repositorio- Web viewFACULDADE DE LETRAS. UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO. Diana Mihai. 2º Ciclo de...

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FACULDADE DE LETRAS UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO Diana Mihai 2º Ciclo de Estudos em Estudos Anglo-Americanos, Variante Estudos sobre Mulheres Literary Renderings of Visual Culture: Intermedial Practices and Definitions of Feminine Identity in Margaret Atwood’ s Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing 2012 Orientador: Professor Rui Carvalho Homem Classificação: Ciclo de estudos: 1

Transcript of repositorio- Web viewFACULDADE DE LETRAS. UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO. Diana Mihai. 2º Ciclo de...

FACULDADE DE LETRASUNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO

Diana Mihai

2º Ciclo de Estudos em Estudos Anglo-Americanos, Variante Estudos sobre Mulheres

Literary Renderings of Visual Culture: Intermedial Practices and Definitions of Feminine Identity in Margaret Atwood’ s Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and

Surfacing

2012

Orientador: Professor Rui Carvalho Homem

Classificação:

Ciclo de estudos:

Dissertação/ relatório/ Projeto/ IPP:

Versão definitiva

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Abstract

This thesis looks at Margaret Atwood´ s Lady Oracle, Cat´s Eye and Surfacing in relation to

various concepts of femininity. It draws upon theories of visual culture while it emphasizes

conventional patterns in the construction of the female image. The thesis’s goal is to demonstrate

the impact of visual culture on the development of female selfhood from the perspective of the

three novels by Margaret Atwood that are mentioned above. The author’s use of intermediality

entails a more in-depth analysis of gender identity and the secondary sources that I have chosen

deal with the construction of gender identity, the visual media representations of femininity and

the word-image relationship. The idea that transpires throughout the thesis is that the way we

process visual information is conditioned by the surrounding cultural and social conventions. I

conclude that the chosen novels call for the production of new cultural codes and, by extension,

new visual representations, so that different understandings and concepts of femininity could be

incorporated.

Resumo

Esta tese analisa as obras de Margaret Atwood intituladas Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye e Surfacing

em relação aos vários conceitos de feminilidade. É inspirada pelas teorias de cultura visual e

salienta os modelos convencionais na construção da imagem da mulher. O objetivo da tese é

demonstrar o impacto da cultura visual no desenvolvimento da individualidade feminina na

perspetiva dos três romances de Margaret Atwood que foram mencionados anteriormente. A

utilização da intermedialidade nestas obras requer uma análise aprofundada da identidade do

género e as fontes secundárias abordam a construção da identidade do género, as representações

da feminilidade nos medias visuais e a relação entre palavra e imagem. A ideia que se revela na

tese é que o modo como nos processamos a informação visual é condicionado pelas convenções

culturais e sociais que nos rodeiam. Em conclusão, os romances propõem a produção de novos

códigos culturais e, por extensão, de novas representações visuais, de modo que diferentes

entendimentos e conceitos da feminilidade possam ser incorporados.

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Table of Contents

1.Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….... .3

1.1. Margaret Atwood’s Fiction and Socio-Cultural Context………………………………….7

1.2. Intermediality and Word-Image Relationship in Margaret Atwood’ s Works: A Few Notes

on Visuality in Western Culture……………………………………………………………...17

2. Culturally Coded Images of Femininity in Margaret Atwood’ s Lady Oracle…………….27

3. Visual Culture and Memory in Margaret Atwood’ s Cat’s Eye……………………………38

4. Challenging Cultural Conditioning and Visual Images of Femininity in Margaret Atwood’s

Surfacing……………………………………………………………………………………...52

5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………66

6. Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………..70

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1. Introduction

This thesis explores Margaret Atwood’ s literary perspective on visual culture’s

construction of female identity, particularly in Lady Oracle(p. 1976), Cat’s Eye (p. 1988) and

Surfacing (p. 1972). The primary aim is to show the visual culture’s representations which are

detrimental to women’s personal development. In doing so, I argue that the three mentioned

novels are literary reflections of this idea. Through their musings and desires, the main characters

of the novels call for innovation and change within their society. By analyzing Atwood’s Lady

Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing I am looking to shed light on the mechanisms behind the visual

representations of women both in mass culture and classical paintings. I will argue that images

are culturally coded and by doing so, I will point out their formative potential.

My reason for undertaking this research on Margaret Atwood’s novels was to be able to

provide a significant analysis on the formation of female selfhood through the patterns made

available by the surrounding visual culture to which Western society has become increasingly

responsive. Her mix of visual art and language gave me the necessary tools with which I could

attain my objectives. In an interview, she notes that “we are great categorizers and pigeonholers

in our society, and one reason is to put them[people] safely into pigeonholes and then dismiss

them, thinking we have summed them up” (Atwood qtd. in Bouson 1993: 3). Taking the imagery

of the pigeonhole as a starting point, one can notice the most conformist characters of her novels

willingly inhabiting small compartments designed to make everybody fit(ting) within their

delineations while the main characters who want to take a step away from them go through

exhausting processes of censorship. Renouncing the habit of looking solely within frames,

Atwood’s novels reflect a widened perspective on gender identity. Secondly, the reason for

which I have chosen Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing is that they are involved with

childhood memories which intervene in the narration with the purpose of making the main

characters and narrators aware of the various sources which brought about their state of mental

turmoil.

In order to answer the question on how do images have a substantial effect on the

development of female identity one must establish the answer as to why they are allowed this

authority. The introductory part of the first chapter traces the commonly accepted notions of

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femininity which lie within the bounds of Western culture. I focus at this incipient stage of the

dissertation on the period between the sixties and seventies to provide the context within which

Atwood wrote her earlier works. To do so, I will mention the Second Wave of Feminism,

concentrating on the objectives of the movement and their relation with Atwood’s literary ideas.

I mention her early works and outline some of her main themes and ideas which underlie her

fiction. From the overall presentation of the social and cultural context which informed Atwood’

works, I move forward to discuss the theories on visual culture and to reveal how they fit within

Atwood’ s later works.

In the second part of the first chapter I argue that visual representations are, in fact, visual

extensions of the Western system of knowledge which contains and spreads the conventional

views on gender identity which were explored in the introductory part of the first chapter.

Having within them normative patterns for representing gender identity, their authority increases

in the eyes of a public which feeds on conventions. In order to exemplify this idea, I use the

visual reproduction of a Pre-Raphaelite painting (Millais’ Ophelia) and a visual example of

representations of femininity from a number of Vogue magazine. Placing them together, I will

pinpoint to some of the key the conventional features of femininity which are spread via visual

culture.

I offer an overview of the theoretical contributions on intermediality and by doing so, I

examine the relationship between word and image so as to provide the main theoretical

framework within which I will work in the following chapters. I draw on the instructive

examples given by WJT Mitchell in Iconology and Susan Sontag’s On Photography. I advance

in my examination of these theories to give a historical account of the development of

ocularcentrism in Western culture in order to indicate that the power of images lies not only in

the concepts that are imprinted on them but also in the Western tendency to focus on visuality.

In relation to visual culture, one of the main collections of short fiction that present the

reader with the mechanisms of contemporary visual culture is Wilderness Tips. It shows how the

people involved in publicity image-making use the techniques of photography to manipulate the

picture. It is underlined that in people’s minds such a picture is seen as an accurate representation

of reality. The publicity industry uses both text and image to create desires. The aim is to make

the viewing subject feel that what he/she is or has is not enough, which brings us to the idea that

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publicity images generate anxiety. Through such images their creators rely on conventional

mindsets to make their visual products seem legitimate.

In the second and third chapter I will take a look at how the main characters and narrators

of Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing weigh up the presence of mass culture’s images. Joan,

Elaine and the nameless character of Surfacing are prompted to incorporate and assimilate the

unwritten rules of behavior which their society promotes. In these novels, mass culture will be

seen as a mechanism for the proliferation of patriarchal concepts on gender identity.

The widely accepted vision of womanhood and the traditional views on gender identity

are analyzed through the lens of Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing. In these

novels, the cultural fabrication of gender identity comes to the surface. The main characters take

journeys into their childhood and by means of them, they challenge the society and culture that

laid the basis of their identities. In Surfacing and Cat’s Eye the characters’ journeys are more

empirical than in Lady Oracle, for the reason that Elaine and Surfacing’s nameless character take

an actual journey to their hometowns whereas Joan merely goes through her childhood

memories. Regardless of this, the act of remembering has a strong effect in every novel.

The characters of Atwood’ s novels develop within the cultural and social arrangements

of a Western society. For historical reasons to which I will be referring only briefly, Western

societies are prone to display features which are patriarchal and ocularcentrist. Through an

analysis of visual culture one can see how these two features are intertwined to eventually

construct gender identity. There are two main areas within visual culture which are given a

special interest in Atwood’ s novels and by extension in my dissertation : advertising/publicity

images and photographs which are found especially in magazines and paintings. Within the area

of advertising, photography is the medium that most efficiently gives the illusion of authenticity

to a picture.

One of the main tendencies with which Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing are

concerned is the internalization of mass culture’s representations, especially when the

construction of female identity is brought into discussion. This concept explains the social

behavior of women as it has two main sources: the need to avoid social isolation and the social

training that is at work in Western society to identify oneself with the images of mass culture.

The point which I underline in these chapters is that these memories reveal the marks of

popular culture on female identity. Dissecting their childhood memories help the characters

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understand the source of their feelings of melancholia. Their main course of action is analyzing

how visual culture triggered their feelings, molded their appearance and steered their behavior.

In addition to this observation, I will show that the female selfhood which was constructed by

means of visual culture retains features of a patriarchal order.

These novels contain memory narratives where the narrators and main characters look

back on their past, on their relationships and on the society of their childhood. In Lady Oracle

the social atmosphere from the main character’s childhood is presented as bleak and unforgiving,

in the same manner as in Cat’s Eye. The female characters are subject to intense scrutinity and

judgment, each ill-fated attitude towards them being justified only by codes and norms. The

characters of Lady Oracle and Cat’s Eye often find themselves examining their appearance. Joan

makes efforts to grow slimmer and Elaine is being shaped by the representations of a Pre-

Raphaelite painting. However, the nameless main character in Surfacing ponders on her friend’s

Anna vanity which is revealed by her obsessive looking into the mirror.

Lady Oracle describes the embodied experience of its main female character and narrator.

Body image is tightly connected to social expectations and the manner in which one views

oneself is steered by the society’s expectations. Being an overweight child that wanted to wear

the pink suits and leggings which are typical of ballet dancers, she was perceived as grotesque

and inappropriate. In turn, such images and concepts related to gender identity are used and re-

used in visual culture.

The public’s obsession with certain images and representations is in accordance with

conventional understandings of gender identity. In Lady Oracle the female body must fit within

strict boundaries, the desirable images of femininity involve allure in Elaine’s case and the

sexualization of female body is manifested in Anna, one of the characters of Surfacing.

In these novels we are presented with a culture that curbs freedom of expression, as the

characters’ social environment gives them a limited array of possibilities to form their identity.

In the world of publicity images, the idea that is extensively promoted is that happiness comes

with the willingness to comply with its visual norms.

Among the three main characters Joan has the weakest sense of self as she was more

pressured to embody the representations of popular culture. As such, she has a series of doubts

related to the validity of her actions and thoughts. In comparison, Elaine presents a strength of

self which she started developing after she broke the connections with the three friends who were

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in the habit of controlling her behavior. In the novel, her psychological journey involves a

search for the source of her melancholia being already equipped with a sound knowledge of who

she is and why she acts in the manner in which she acts. At the beginning of Surfacing, the main

character and narrator is already leaving behind the(visual) conventions of her society as she

expresses her dissatisfaction with her present condition and she starts the trip back to her

hometown with a willingness to change her perspective on life, and the reader sees her

succeeding.

Finally, Surfacing will show that one needs to take a more critical stance towards the representations

which are contained by one’s culture. I will end my thesis with this novel because aside from gathering

observations on (visual) culture it puts forward the idea that other meanings must be produced, and the

understanding that one has of the gender relations and the role of the individual within society has to be re-

assessed and changed and the cliché of fresh perspective gains a different aspect, one which is more revealing.

1.2. Margaret Atwood’s Fiction and Socio-Cultural Context

Atwood´s early fiction coincides with the rise of the second wave of feminism.

Although her inspiration was not drawn from the movement, the author´s concerns resemble

those of the second-wave feminists. In order to connect Atwood´s early fiction to the second

wave of feminism, it is necessary to mention what prompted the movement in the first place.

Beginning with the second wave of feminism, female scholars and activists have found that the

problem of society concerning women resided in the mainstream definitions of femininity.

Women´s social condition in the sixties and the period that led up to this decade was defined by

various political and cultural factors. From a political point of view, Kate Millett shed light on

patriarchy as a political characteristic and at the same time “as a profound organizational

principle that affected all of culture and society (Gerhard 2001: 92). It was perceived by Millett

and by feminists of her caliber as interior colonization. In her 1979 book Reinventing

Womanhood Carolyn Heilbrun characterized the tendency of women in Western society to abide

by disadvantageous rules of social practice and to internalize them, as an effort to avoid

isolation:

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Women try to evade the psychological isolation of the outsider not by bonding

with each other but rather by taking on the status of their husbands, if they are

housewives, or by accepting the status of honorary male if they succeed in

penetrating the professional or business world (1979: 39).

The ramifications of these widely accepted definitions of femininity were mostly seen

when women reached the point in their lives when they needed to get married. Marriage

represented the stage when they officially had to take upon a self-effacing role. Furthermore,

motherhood along with marriage were seen as a fulfillment of femininity. As such, there was a

problem of identity as in white middle-class circles people did not expect women to develop a

strong sense of selfhood. Betty Friedan called it the “malaise” of the white middle-class woman

that was caused by a “denial of human potential” which was inherent in the popularly accepted

definitions of femininity (Gerhard 2001: 88).

Given the situation, female scholars asked for a re-definition of the concepts of

womanhood. In her study on feminine identity, Carolyn Heilbrun sets forth the idea that “women

´s position in society, or at least their traditional view of their position, puts them under social

and psychological pressures that continually undermine their ability to bond” (1979: 39). The

study continues with an emphasis on the necessity for women to bond and form a coherent

movement that would counteract women´s unsatisfactory position. As she argues, this was a

purpose that met with a high amount of resistance because of the deep-rooted mindset which

they actually intended to counteract.

The need to redefine womanhood has been crystallized in this movement, but still the

cause did not receive the support which was needed because of aggressive attempts at keeping

the conventional statute of women. In such a context, second-wave feminists put across the idea

that more women had to be first of all, aware of the lack of privileges which were characteristic

of the period between the sixties and the seventies’ social organization. Women still believed

that they could attain womanhood through marriage, birth and child raising and imposed those

views on the younger generation. As Heilbrun noted, the women who attained high positions

were taking pride in the features of manhood that were ascribed to their personality.

In other words, the main objective of second-wave feminists was to make the public

aware of the cultural fabrication of gender identities. The concept of femininity was especially

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examined and deconstructed by them because it was “a cultural construct permeated with social

values that had little basis in biology or genuine female experience”(Gerhard 2001: 88). In the

late seventies and early eighties feminists sought to give a new form to mainstream culture as

they realized that changing the culture and changing mentalities was one of the basic courses of

action.

From her first novel, Atwood reiterates the idea that there is no boundary between the

public and the personal as the public aggressively influences every aspect of human identity.

Some of her female characters act in such a manner that places them in line with popular

expectations, only to find themselves feeling uncertain about their decisions, questioning

throughout the plot the morals of the very society that aims to mold their character. When her

early works were published, Atwood gave a series of counter arguments to the idea that her

novels were the product of the second wave of feminism. With regard to Edible Woman she

argued that she doesn’t “consider it feminism”, she “simply consider[s] it social realism. That

part of it is simply social reporting” (Atwood qtd. in Tolan 2007: 3). Atwood was also invoking

the chronological argument that, for example, Edible Woman which was published in 1969 was

conceived in 1965, at a time when the Women’s Liberation Movement had not been officially set

in motion. She enlists among her influences Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan’s works

which in turn were the ground works on which the liberation movement of the late sixties and

early seventies was built: “I myself see the book as protofeminist rather than feminist: there was

no women’s movement in sight when I was composing the book in 1965, and I’m not gifted with

clairvoyance, though like many at the time I’d read Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir

behind locked doors” (Atwood qtd. in Tolan 2007: 9). Atwood’s stance towards the second wave

of feminism was not dismissive as one can deduce, from the passages above, that rather than

taking upon an ideological path, she responded to the problems which the women were dealing

with in her period. However, what particularly connects Atwood to the second wave of feminism

in her first novel Edible Woman is the inspiration she drew from her period´s context, the

rendering of the effects which the social organization of the sixties had on a woman´s psyche. In

order to avoid generalizations, it is important to note that the effects were not the same for every

woman. As we have seen before there were women who were content in their role as supporters

of their male partners and at the same time, there was a handful of women who entered a male-

dominated area of work only to end up looking down on other women. Nevertheless, Atwood

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keeps in mind the women that feel the need to not comply and to question the role they have

been given. Thus, in Edible Woman, the reader is introduced to the psychological journey of the

woman who detects the flaws in the way society is treating her gender and by extension herself

as an individual but who has no resources to fight against them.

In the first chapter of the novel, the inner workings of corporations are closely examined.

After all, they developed the mediums through which the long-contested ideas of femininity were

disseminated. In this regard, Atwood focuses on male privilege in the Western patriarchal society

while she directs her criticism at consumerism. Through her main character’s profession she

gives a detailed account of consumer behavior. Before she gets married, Marian’ s job is to test

the market by conducting interviews on how a product is being received by its consumers. In the

period which she spends at the company she describes the distribution of power: her company

was divided into three layers where the upper layer was composed mostly of men: “On the floor

above are the executives and the psychologists – referred to as the men upstairs, since they are all

men” (1998: 45).

These passages of the novel indicate the mechanisms through which power is ascribed to

various groups of people. Pilar Somacarrera draws a comparison between Atwood’s and

Foucault’s views on power as she states that for both of them power does not come from one

core source and it is not located in one place it is suffused through all social relations. Thus, it is

hard to pinpoint where power comes from : “power after all is not real, not really there: people

give it to each other” (Atwood qtd. in Somacarrera 2006: 45). Although the feminist slogan

“Personal Is Political” was not among Atwood’s influences, it is, nevertheless, a view which she

shared with the feminists of the sixties and seventies. The suffusion of politics into personal lives

is exemplified in Edible Woman, in the passages where Marian’s friend Ainsley experiences

second thoughts about her abilities to raise a male child alone. Upon her visit to the doctor’s

office she is informed that a boy must have a strong male role model because the child will likely

grow up to be a homosexual. One notices from these passages that family planning and the

accepted image of harmonious family life was controlled by political factors: “And I was so

happy, and I was doing my knitting and everything during the first speaker – he talked about the

Advantages of Breastfeeding. They even have an Association for it now” (1998: 245).

In the sixties, Atwood represented relationships as a social practice within which the man

was given the power to expand his influence over the life of his wife. In Edible Woman the

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narrator says about her fiancé that he monopolizes her, which hints that such a relationship

begins to have corporatist features. By mentioning Power Politics, Nischik holds that Atwood is

fighting against

Binary gender relations that leave even the most intimate love affairs exposed to

political power structures. The code of idealized romantic love is crossed by the

code of political (gender) equality, making the reality of love part of political

activity(2009: 40).

In the case of Edible Woman Ainsley’ s determination and self-confidence is deterred by

external influences from her social environment. If, at the beginning, she felt confident in

bringing up a child by herself towards the end her independent self does not seem enough. In

referring to her short stories, Nischik puts forward the idea that Atwood’s short fiction is full of

characters who dangle between two opposite states (i.e. passivity/activity, action/reactions,

initiative/blockage)(Nischik 2009: 75). Although Edible Woman is a novel, the behavior of the

two main female characters exhibits the same schism. While Ainsley takes a more assertive

stance in planning her life but finds opposition to her views, Marian is aware of her own

passivity and at the same time she reacts against it. The structure of the novel brings to surface

the split in her personality: the first and third chapter are written in the first person and the

second one is presented in a third-person narrative.

As she provides the reader with Marian and Ainsley’s experience in the early sixties’

society, Atwood paints a clearer image of the imbalance in gender relations which was prevalent

in that period. The unevenness of the ways in which men and women were expected to perform

their roles in society represents the focus of Power Politics as well. A poem which belongs to

the Power Politics collection, “She considers evading him” begins by emphasizing the

complying acts to which the lyrical I has to resort and the pressure of a relationship that demands

only compromise from her: “I can change my-/self more easily/than I can change you” (Atwood

1978: 143). The poem suggests that the expectations for the female partner to renounce aspects

of her personality is deeply-rooted in the way one views relationships as it emphasizes the

difficulty with which the man is ready to strike a balance.

Furthermore, Atwood’s character’s lives are marked by ambivalence which is caused

particularly by the aggressiveness of their social environment which asks from them to take upon

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roles that come against their need for freedom of thought and action. The reason for these

confusing outlooks on life is the internalization of features which are of political, cultural or

social nature. This idea echoes Millett’ s description of the practice of internalizing only the

features which are demanded by society as interior colonization, a term which was used in the

first passages of the thesis. In relation to this, Atwood emphasizes that “to acknowledge the

victim position but to explain it as an act of God, the dictates of Biology (in the case of women

for instance), the necessity decreed by History, or Economics, or the Unconscious, or any other

large general powerful idea” is one of the basic victim positions (Somacarrera 2006: 44). In this

description, Atwood brings together the whole range of arguments which were used to justify the

inferior position which women(especially the ones who were part of the white middle-class)

were pushed by their society to take. Firstly, she brings forward the common explanation for

women’s confinement to the private space as a divine duty. The dictates of biology brings

forward for consideration the popular conviction that motherhood is another factor in a woman’s

life that keeps her tied to home life.

In her short stories, Atwood reveals that such experiences through which her characters

have to go through are affected by the social context which she depicts as being “sick”1.

According to Nischik, these experiences ultimately have effects on the individual’s psyche

(2009: 74). In this overbearing atmosphere, readers are led to understand the importance of

women bonding, something that Carol Heilbrun proposed as well. As a result, female characters

have to focus their attention on other female characters to find out more about their personality

and about the way in which they have viewed the concept of femininity throughout their lives.

Her collections of short stories, Bluebeard’s Egg and Wilderness Tips present characters

in moments of revelation when they understand that they have been seeing the world around

them through the lens of conventions and popular convictions. The narrator of “Betty”

remembers the unfairness with which she judged her neighbor, the title-character of the story,

and the misperception she had of Betty’s husband as an outstanding man. Seeing Betty through

the lens of what she was supposed to be was detrimental because as one finds out from the

ending of the story, no one could have known if all the internal struggles that the narrator

presented to the readers were factual as no one around her gave it a second thought. In this short

1 Nischik uses this term in her book on Atwood’s fiction, Engendering Genre, in order to explain the pressures which her female characters experience in a Western social context and which push them into “a more acceptable world of madness (2009: 74).”

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story, views on marriage and femininity are closely examined. The narrator’s father considered

that when husbands left women it was because of their foolishness. Here it is revealed that, in

conventional terms, the woman’ s duty was to do her best in keeping her married status and the

private sphere was hers to handle.

"Betty's a fool," my father said. "She always was." Later, when husbands and

wives leaving each other became more common, he often said this, but no matter

which one had left it was always the woman he called the fool. His highest

compliment to my mother was that she was no fool (Atwood 1998: 59).

During her childhood the narrator’s opinion of her neighbor did not differ from that of her

father’s as Betty was the person whose life was of slight importance. Fred was the focus of her

attention as well as of her sister’s. He had the privilege of leading a more complex life while

Betty remained at home. By extension, her only interests were the activities which she had to

carry on in the house. As such, Atwood reveals that Betty’s assumed triviality was the product

of the society that asked women to dedicate their lives to their homes. The narrator does not

consider this until she gets to an adult stage. Moreover, at this stage, she understands that her

memories about Betty were more influential in the development of her personality than she

knew.

Childhood memories are frequently depicted in Atwood’s short fiction and novels. The

characters go through various of moments from the period when they were most impressionable.

The reader notices that, as the adult versions of the main characters dig deeper into their

childhood, they begin to find more explanations about their present condition.

In her short fiction the importance of remembrance and the search of her characters for

discovering what formed their identity is conceived in different ways from Dancing Girls to

Wilderness Tips. As opposed to her first collection of short stories entitled Dancing Girls or her

first novel where the female characters are drawn into endless despair and where the plot is

dominated by confusion, Bluebeard’s Egg reveals characters who have more potential for

success:

In contrast to Dancing Girls, however, where stories on these themes are suffused

with desperation and hopelessness, the stories of Bluebeard’s Egg hold out a

glimmer of hope, alternative realities, which provide a source of comfort for the

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(usually female) protagonists in their times of crisis – not solving their problems,

but at least rendering them more tolerable (Nischik 2009: 149).

With the publication of Wilderness Tips, the characters of Atwood’s short fiction pass to a

higher level where they can look at their condition with humor and resourcefulness. They hold

more answers with regard to their own identity than the ones from previous collections. The

characters from Wilderness Tips “have a greater ability to transcend catastrophies in their lives,

achieving at least the suggestion of a ‘fresh beginning’” (Nischik 2009: 150).

A number of stories in Wilderness Tips are narrated retrospectively,

demonstrating on the one hand how experiences from the past are reinterpreted in

retrospect, and on the other how formative they can be ( Nischik 2009: 151).

I argue that the realization of the formative potential which the evaluation of the past has,

is found in Bluebeard’s Egg as well. Wrapped in a veil of mystery by society’ s dismissal of

women’s identities, dead characters remain stuck in the minds of the narrators and of the main

characters and emerge as the plot evolves. Usually the characters belong to the narrators’

childhood, a period marked by lack of discernment. Betty is such a character, particularly after

her sudden death. Such characters are haunting, their images surface and there is a sense of

awakening in their quest for answers. In this respect, Betty emerges in the narrator’s life as the

person who was misunderstood. In the past, Betty was perceived as a plain character and in her

adult years the narrator acknowledges the meaningful presence she was especially in the

formation of her personality: In the end, she tells us that the faith of this woman(she died from a

brain tumor) kept her from making the “demanded choices.”

In “True Trash” which belongs to the Wilderness Tips collection, the female character that

takes much of the main character’s thoughts is not dead but her memory is still haunting. The

short story focuses on the experience of a group of girls who work as waitresses at a camp. The

fate of the girl from the camp who got pregnant after having a relationship with a younger boy

raises some questions in the main character’s mind: “And what has become of Ronette after all

left behind in the past, dappled by its chiaroscuro, stained and haloed by it, stuck with other

people’s adjectives?” (1998: 30).

15

The link between past and present, or more specifically between past mindsets and

present ones is detailed in “True Trash” (Wilderness Tips) and “Betty” (Bluebeard’s Egg).

Ronette was the haunting presence of “True Trash” ’s main character. In the past, the act of

having intercourse with a younger boy was seen as unacceptable but in the character’s present

times it was part of the general direction in which the society evolved:

A fourteen year old boy. Ludicrous.[…] Ludicrous then, possible now. You can

do anything now and it won’t cause a shock. Just a shrug. Everything is cool. A

line has been drawn and on the other side of it is the past, both darker and more

brightly intense than the present (1998: 29)

The pass from a more innocent outlook on life to an awakened state of mind is recurrent

in both Atwood’s short fiction and novels. “Death by Landscape “tells the story of two girls Lois

and Lucy who were very close during the period in which they were campers. Lucy disappears

during a trip in the woods and her body never comes into sight, leaving Lois with gaps and

bewilderment. When she is pressured by Cappie, the camp leader, to take the blame for her

friend’s disappearance the character feels hurt but as she matures the reasons behind Cappie’s

attitude unravel: “Later, when she was grown up, Lois was able to understand what this

interview had been about. She could see Cappie’s desperation, her need for a story, a real story

with a reason in it; anything but a senseless vacancy Lucy had left for her to deal with […]Lois

worked all this out, twenty years later.. But it was far too late” (1998: 116). Fiona Tolan brings

into discussion Freud’s analysis of the unconscious by relating it to Atwood’s fiction and which

says that : “the mind which appears so chaotic, contradictory, beyond causation, is ruled by

inexorable laws. Mental events are like pearls on an invisible chain, a chain largely invisible

precisely because many of the links are unconscious” (Freud qtd. in Tolan 2007: 191). As I will

argue in the second chapter of the dissertation, the main character and narrator of Cat’s Eye

experiences such memories which she analyzes by visual means.

The poor self- image that women in Atwood’s novels have is constructed through popular

culture media. Women learn to act unassertively because a lot of power is assigned to those

representations of popular culture which rely on patriarchal conventions. Nischik informs us that

in Atwood’s 1969 collection of short stories Dancing Girls her characters “confuse their

dependence on their partners with love” (2009: 73). In fact, love is in her prose and poetry, a

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concept that was given shape by the mechanisms of mass media. In Power Politics the lyrical I

complains that “you take my hand and I’m suddenly in a bad movie” (1978: 142) suggesting that

there is a thin line between what one sees on the screen and what has been transferred into day to

day reality. This also proves the unevenness in gender relations. Because the form that love took

in the sixties was mostly to the disadvantage of women and to emphasize this point Nischik

provides the reader with a German philosopher Fichte description of women and men’s manner

of loving:

The uncorrupted woman possesses no sexual instinct; none manifests itself in her.

Rather she is filled with love and this love is the natural instinct of a woman to

satisfy a man (2009: 39).

Moreover, love is idealized through popular culture practices and such representations

have in foreground a mysticised feminine identity like the one that was developed by Fichte. The

idealization of such features was done more effectively through visual media. Focusing on the

unevenness of gender relations and on finding answers about what impels individuals to act in a

certain manner, Atwood brings into discussion the visual culture which, as I will demonstrate

further on in my work, has the highest potential for forming one’s character.

She brings forward, in a majority of her novels, the patterns of behavior and appearance

that are distributed by both popular culture and paintings. Repetitive plot patterns are introduced

in the life of the lyrical I from the collection of poems Power Politics and in these circumstances

the I expresses awareness of her addiction to them (Nischik 2009: 132). Gender relationship and

the existence of power games in a contemporary social milieu constitute issues that are

thoroughly explored in Atwoodian fiction. A lot of these issues are represented in relation to

visual culture. She draws inspiration from so-called high and low art, from photographic material

to pictorial styles. In the following passages, I will explain why visual culture is significant to

Atwood’s fiction.

In many of her works Atwood provides her readers with descriptions of magazines,

especially those that are marketed for a female readership. Her collection of short stories entitled

“Wilderness Tips” involves journalistic practices and popular culture references. In “Hack

Wednesday”, Marcia, the main character, buys on her way to work a magazine entitled True

Woman. As she browses through it we are presented with a few of the topics that such a

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magazine might have: “she thumbs through the holiday fashions and the diet of the month,

licking chocolate from her fingers. Then she settles into a piece entitled, with misplaced

assurance, ‘What Men Really Think ’” (1998: 213). The characters of these short stories often

make associations with popular culture examples which they apply to their own lives. By

drawing from a tampon ad the characters from “The Age of Lead” defined their desire of

unconstrained living: “As he dipped Jane backwards he whispered into her ears: “No belts, no

pins, no pads, no chafing.”[…] It was what they both wanted: freedom from the world of

mothers, from the world of precautions […] they wanted a life without consequences” (1998:

134).

1.2. Intermediality and the Word-Image Relationship in Margaret Atwood’ s

Works: A Few Notes on Visuality

Intermediality is an interdisciplinary field of study which is involved with the analysis of

the works of art which, in one way or another, spring from the incorporation of one artistic form

into another. Peter Wagner describes intermediality as “the intertextual use of one medium

[which for example, can be a painting] into another medium (prose fiction)” (17). The question

from which critics depart is what makes intermediality (examining the relation between a visual

artistic mode of spreading certain values, of passing over knowledge, and a verbal one) a

valuable research project? As we will find out before images have potential for shaping the

manner in which reality is being viewed. In relation to this, Umberto Eco stated that the image,

Possesses an irresistible force. It produces and effect of reality, even when it is

false. It cannot say by itself that it does not exist or that it is false, whereas the text

can do that. Without text, the image lies or gives way to a multitude of

interpretations (Eco qtd. in Wagner 1996: 30).

The text acts in Umberto Eco’s view as an addition to the image, as a manner of

responding to a necessity for the image to be interpreted. In this case, the text can either impose

on the image, attaching to it various interpretations, or provide a good medium for the readers

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and viewers to unearth an aspect of certain visual materials which, perhaps, they have not

considered. To exemplify, Atwood represents the present strategies of creating a picture as

usually having a negative influence on the psyche of her characters. Language cooperates with

image because through language she has the opportunity of examining the way in which one

views a picture and the way in which the picture is being (mis)perceived. In her novels, the

routine of gazing at an image has been shaped by representational conventions: lighting makes

the subject look differently than in real life or the posture which the artist picks for his/her model

alludes to certain features which do not necessarily belong to the nature of the individual.

On the one hand we are promised a discursive science of images, a mastering of

the icon by the logos; on the other hand (as Wood notes), certain persistent

images and likenesses insinuate themselves into that discourse, leading it into

totalizing “world-pictures” and “world-views” (Mitchell 1986: 24).

This expansion of images has been examined in different fields of study, from sociology

to anthropology. Fashion magazines provide substantial material for study because of their

combination between image and word through which they succeed in influencing the way in

which their consumers view gender identity.

Since the late nineteenth century, word and image have increasingly propagated

style. Images of desire are constantly in circulation; increasingly it has been the

image as well as the artefact that the individual has purchased. Fashion is a

magical system, and what we see as we leaf through glossy magazines is ‘the

look’(Wilson qtd. in White 2000: 29).

Through the lens of iconological investigations, one notices that traditional

understandings of femininity live on within visual culture. In Mitchell’ s view, “what we are

matching against pictorial representations is not any sort of naked reality but a world already

clothed in our systems of representation” (1986: 38). In addition, he underlines that knowledge is

“a social product, a matter of dialogue between different versions of the world, including

different languages, ideologies and modes of representations” (1986: 38). In this light, one

deducts that vision is a social and cultural construct, as we are trained through our system of

representations to understand the world in a certain given/pre-established way.

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Mitchell places emphasis on Wittgenstein’s view that in present-day society, a

considerable effort must be put into examining “the ways in which we put images ‘into our

heads’” (1986: 15).I argue that another important question is why we give authority to some

images, a question which will be clarified in the next chapters. To provide another critical

support for Atwood’s writings is Susan Sontag’s theory that in photographic practices “ideology

determines what constitutes an event” (2005: 14).One chooses what to show, what to include in

an image. With this in mind, Mitchell’s statement that: “we can never understand a picture unless

we grasp the ways in which it shows what cannot be seen” (1986: 39) shows us that one should

give up the belief that, for example, what we see in a photograph is a through and through

representation of reality.

Historical accounts of the increasing power of images pinpoint the fact that, in the

Western world, from the period in time when images started to proliferate at a faster rate, the

visual took a step towards a higher level. Consequently, “forms of knowledge” started to depend

on a “scopic regime that equated seeing with knowledge”, a shift of values which is called

ocularcentrism and which refers to the “ apparent centrality of the vision in contemporary

Western life” (Rose 2007: 7). There are opinions which state that the focus on knowledge

through vision began with the invention of the camera obscura.2 In fact, ocular epistemology was

given a high amount of importance before the invention of camera obscura and as Lalvani

argues, there was a “general ocular concern for accuracy, evinced by a rising bourgeois merchant

class” (8). To support his view, Lalvani quotes Sartre who said in relation to visuality in

Renaissance period that “ Europeans came more and more to believe that things planned or seen

from a central viewpoint had greater monumentality and moral authority than those which were

not” (Sartre qtd. in Lalvani 1996: 8). Lalvani continues his argument by mentioning Renaissance

commercial practices and by quoting Edgerton who noted that “Florentine businessmen were in

all likelihood ´disposed to a visual order that would accord with the tidy principles of

mathematical order that they applied to their bank ledgers” (Edgerton qtd. in Lalvani 1996: 8).

As mechanical reproductions bloomed and entered the market in the form of commodities,

ocularcentrism began to be more powerful starting from the period between the late 19th century-

early 20th century which included the first steps which were taken towards the development of

2 According to Susan Sontag, camera obscura was a device that “projected [an] image, but did not fix it (2005: 67).”

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camera as we now know it. The role of images in the social context was strengthened by

commercial practices.

In Atwood’s fiction, the inclination towards the visual in Western culture is literarily

illustrated when she explains the choice of one of her characters from “Wilderness Tips” to pick

a certain type of popular culture material so that he could improve his English: “Perhaps it was

another sort of tip, as in the “ Handy Tips for Happy Homemakers” columns in the women’s

magazines he had taken to reading in order to improve his English- the vocabularies were fairly

simple and there were pictures which was a big help” (1998: 191). In this context of ruling visual

representations, images are signs that need to be decoded in order to understand social practices.

The individual has to learn what constructed his/her identity. In this regard, Margaret Atwood’s

characters seek to find answers to a particular question that, as the story goes on, consumes them,

more specifically the question of who they “really” are. The reasons for their failure to gather

answers for this question are the external pressures, unwritten rules of behavior, mass-produced

images and mass-produced ways of viewing the world. Nevertheless, they strive. Concerning

media’s role within our society, Sontag argues that “the real is increasingly inaccessible because

of the intrusiveness of media in our lives” and there are reasonable arguments to say that “reality

is a construct subject to the interests of those with power and influence” (2005: 4). In “Hairball”

the author finds in magazines the potential to shape public opinion and to make individuals lose

track of what it means to have a “true’ self(if there is still one to begin with):

It’s simple, Kat told them. You bombard them with images of what they ought to

be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You’re working

with the gap between reality and perception. That’s why you have to hit them

with something new, something they never seen before, something they aren’t.

Nothing sells like anxiety (1998: 41).

As these sentences show, the practice behind the creation of fashion magazines causes a

perpetual state of confusion as one is pressured into being a person that a magazine virtually

creates. The reason why decoding images holds an important place in finding out what makes us

who we are is the fact that nowadays visual pieces are mass produced. After such a process art

and visual images become commodities. When art becomes a commodity, mass-produced artistic

creations will be vulnerable to conform to the demands of the market. The mirror self that

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Wendy Steiner mentions in her Introduction to The Real Real Thing will reflect less of that real

thing which artists have been searching for. Considering that viewers emulate what they see in a

visual piece, the viewing experience must take center stage in the analysis of visual culture and

its effects on individuals. Gen Doy argues in her book Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the

Subject in Visual Culture that, in order to realize how selfhood relates to visual images,

we need to consider the viewing subject, her/his positioning and the way in which

the visual image or artwork may address a particular spectator. Meanings are not

simply encoded into the image by its maker, but arise from the encounter of

individuals or groups of viewers with the work, whether this is an original fine art

painting in a gallery, or a film, viewed in a cinema under rather different

conditions, and devoid of its ‘aura’ of uniqueness in time, place and origin, as

Walter Benjamin pointed out in his influential essay from the late 1930s, ‘The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (2005: 7).

The dynamic between audience, artwork and artist shows that what is at work in our

society is the shared social and cultural understanding of different concepts. The mass media

which produce the images which influence our thinking because of the social and cultural codes

which they hold within them has this formative power, but, at the same time, it can be molded by

the audience. In my thesis, I argue that when characters challenge and re-assess the

representations of femininity conveyed by mass media they reveal a yearning for change:

To use an old postmodern metaphor, the media is like a virus. It infects everything

it touches, but it is also, in turn, changed by what it comes into contact with—it

mutates (Lumby qtd. in Alvermann 1999: 143).

As a result, one understands that the concept of the “real”(self) is far from our reach. For

Susan Sontag, “To live is to pose” (Sontag qtd. in Steiner 2010: 2). In this respect “Hairball”

character Gerald is seen by the narrator as a person who needs to look at himself from the outside

as he needs to constantly check how he is perceived: he likes mirrors and “he kisses […] as if he

thinks someone else is watching him, judging the image they make together” (35). This attitude

finds its explanation also in the fact that “banal gestures” and a “hunger to impress” make up a

great part of Gerald’s personality. He typifies the tendency to conduct his life according to mass

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culture’s visual representations. Ernst van Alphen refers to art “as the realm where ideas and

values, the building stones of culture, are actively created, constituted and mobilized (xiii)”. In

Stuart Hall’s words “culture is concerned with the giving and taking of meaning” and it “depends

on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is around them, making sense of the world in

broadly similar ways (Hall qtd. in Rose 2007: 5)”. In other words, we reproduce what art

displays to us because it is among the elements that constructed our culture as we know it.

However, Margaret Atwood’s speech at Stratford University in 1997 puts forward another

important view that the artist depicts in his/her art what he/she is conditioned to see. To illustrate

this matter, Atwood talks about Susanna Moodie, an author who was contemporary with Grace

Marks, the main character of her historical novel , Alias Grace. The “tainted glasses” through

which Susanna Moodie was looking when she created the literary image of Grace Marks as a

mad woman are a metaphor for the role of social and cultural conditioning in the creation of an

artwork, be it literary or visual:

the real-life Susanna Moodie, who saw the real-life Grace Marks in the Toronto

Lunatic Asylum during her visit there in 1851, was looking at her through tinted

glasses. She saw the kind of madwoman she had been conditioned to see, and

presented her accordingly; since Grace had been involved in a murder, she leans

towards the Lady MacBeth end of things. Her account of Grace in the asylum

appears in her 1853 book, Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush, and right after it

she prints her own poem, “The Maniac,” which, although written in the same jolly

verse form as “The Night Before Christmas,” has the virtue of hitting all of the

expected Victorian notes (Atwood qtd. in talkingpeople.net).

Wendy Steiner maintains that as “a realm of mirrors, of fantasy and feint, the arts have

always presented a conundrum in terms of their real-world efficacy” and as such, “art makes

something happen- ethical events that are not just represented in artworks, but happen in

life”(2010: 3). Artistic reflections on different concepts or states of mind are thus a subject for

consideration. In the above-mentioned speech, Atwood chose to tackle the artistic depictions of

madness in relation to her character Grace Marks and to Shakespeare’s Ophelia. In the case of

Ophelia, the scenic details which are rendered in the play become relevant to the analysis when

they are taken from a gender point of view; she notes that in various literary works the flower

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arrangement indicated the death of a female character and these elements are mostly associated

with femininity rather than masculinity:

This floral motif, though it probably didn’t originate with Ophelia, was given such

a push by her that it became almost de rigeur for nineteenth-century literary

madwomen; though mad persons of the male gender don’t go in for plant and

flower arrangements much in the nineteenth century(Atwood qtd. in

talkingpeople.net).

This manner of dying translated into a stereotype, and with regard to such processes of

stereotyping Atwood argues that “people who haven’t known any real mad people think [ that

this is the behavior] madwomen ought to have”(Atwood qtd. in talkingpeople.net). The flower

motifs were taken on by the Pre-Raphaelites, Millais’ painting Ophelia being related to this

particular stereotype of the idealized mad woman. His Ophelia flows on the water with her

mouth half opened ( a commonly encountered style of presenting the female character in Pre-

Raphaelite paintings) encircled by flowers wearing a dress that blends with the surroundings.

The practice of captivating the public with images of femininity which romanticizes vulnerable

postures of women is also noticeable in mass culture’s visual products. The pictures below show

Millais’ painting and a photo of Vogue magazine, where the model is lying with the same

posture as Millais’ Ophelia and in the same setting.

Fig. 1.1. Millais, Sir John Everett. Ophelia. Oil on canvas. Tate Gallery, London.

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Fig. 1.2. Visual Representation of Femininity in Mass-Media. Vogue.

Seeing that unraveling the visual mechanisms that construct Western culture is a

significant process, the focus needs to be directed towards visual representations that form

gender identity. Feminist criticism is an important tool in this process. Dress has been regarded

by feminist scholars as a visual medium that has a strong effect on how women are viewed and

how they view themselves. Dress invests us with certain features which belong (in conventional

terms) to our respective genders. In the past it conferred status and it conveyed ideas of power. .

As Virginia Woolf famously writes in her essay “Three Guineas” (where she looks at

photographs of famous men in order to make connections between masculinity and war),

“Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those

that you wear as soldiers. Since the red and the gold, the brass and the feathers are discarded

upon active service, it is plain that their expensive and not, one might suppose, hygienic splendor

is invented partly to invest the beholder with the majesty of the military office” (2000: 27).

Atwood shares with Woolf the view that there is much more to clothes than we give them credit

for. In her ekphrastic poem “Manet’s Olympia” she lays a certain amount of emphasis on

Olympia’s nude posture and then she writes that “Above the head of the (clothed) maid/ is an

invisible voice balloon: Slut” (1995: 24). The poetic subject suggests that Olympia’s nakedness

has been represented in an unconventional manner. As the character’s pose is being described

she mentions the maid in the room underlining the fact that she is clothed.

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All things considered, if getting to the core of the “real” self is an unattainable goal,

Atwood pleads instead for keeping a mind unconstrained by conventional mindsets, to shift from

being a follower of norms to being an observer of society. To do so, she argues that one needs to

have a deeper understanding of gender notions. When an interviewer asked her to comment on

some critics’ disapproval of using a feminist viewpoint in her works, which from where they

were standing indicated a form of propaganda, she answered that to be an observer of society

means dealing with feminist views: “ Am I a propagandist? Am I an observer of society? Yes!

And no one who observes society can fail to make observations which are feminist” (Atwood

qtd. in Kuhn 2005: 43). From what Atwood puts forward, we can deduce that a feminist

approach in analyzing visual culture is, by extension, significant. Thus, Atwood starts off from

the same idea as Mieke Bal who maintains that pictures are “ rhetoric or encoded signs that must

and can be ‘read’ with the tools provided by narratology and poststructural theories including

feminism” (Bal qtd. in Wagner 1993: 3).

In her writings that tackle visual culture issues, photography is another artistic practice

that more effectively illustrates the human need to hold on to ideas of undeniable representations

of reality. Atwood’s poem collection contains a series of works in which she talks about

photography and the subjects of a photographic image. Contemporary scholars point to a

commonplace idea in today’s culture of regarding photographs as an accurate representation of

reality. In relation to this, Sontag emphasizes that photographs should not be seen merely as facts

as they encompass both a “transcription of reality” (Sontag 2004: 23) and “an interpretation of

it” (Sontag 2004: 23). In addition, depending on style, a photograph is a transcription of reality in

mathematical terms. Because of these features which photographs retain, the same

ocularcentristic pattern of thought which was prevalent in Western society since the beginnings

of modernity, persists in our present times as well. What is being overlooked is the fact that

something happens behind the camera as the photographer can arrange his/her representation of

the world in a manner that would convey what he/she wants. Susan Sontag notes that a

photograph seems to have a more innocent and therefore a more accurate relation to the visible

reality than other mimetic objects do because, as she argues,

a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly

selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all

photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is

26

no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth (2005:

5).

In “Girl and Horse, 1928” Atwood reveals to her readers the fact that there is a version of

reality behind the makings of a photograph which the viewer is not aware of. The poetic subject

is involved in a discussion with the subject of the photograph asking her about the reason why

she smiles and revealing that her happiness does not correspond to the surrounding atmosphere.

She suggests that what the viewer sees in the photo is illusory:

Why do you smile? Can't you

see the apple blossoms falling around

you, snow, sun, snow, listen, the tree

dries and is being burnt, the wind […]

is bending, your body, your face

ripples like water where did you go (Atwood 1978: 119)

With the aim of bringing down the scopic regime, Atwood presents visuality as

unreliable. In “Hairball” she uses terms like “frozen” and the “choosing eye” to exhibit the two

most important aspects of a pose: its objectification of time and space and the authority of the

photographer to manipulate it into looking authentic. She also underlines the habit of an

audience/ viewers to associate concepts like beauty and desire with a certain visual object. In

doing so, she presents the easiness with which an image can be fabricated and still retain the

sense of reality:

What they could never get through their heads was that it was done entirely with

cameras. Frozen light, frozen time. Given the angle she could make any woman

look ugly. Any man as well. She could make anyone look beautiful, or at least

interesting. It was all photography, it was all iconography. It was all in the

choosing eye (1998: 37)

For the reasons listed above, the main characters of the three novels on which I will focus

in the next chapters, are preoccupied with looking beyond appearance and the framed image in

order to put themselves in relation with the complex social and cultural structures in which the

27

surrounding visual materials of their society were produced. The alienation of the main

characters implies their need of change in their social contexts. However, as I will show, such

needs will be subjected to censure.

2. Culturally Coded Images of Femininity in Margaret Atwood’ s Lady Oracle

The next three chapters are concerned with the role of images in the development of

selfhood as the novels chosen focus on formative events of their female character’s childhood.

They underline the importance of memory as the act of remembering both unearths the visual

pieces which were applied to each individual case and is triggered by various visual media. I

begin by exploring the systems of meaning behind the visual representations of women which

are employed in mass culture as they are presented in Lady Oracle. I point out that the mass

culture recurrent images are saturated with cultural codes and for the purpose of this work, I refer

to the external powers which form identity and selfhood by focusing on popular culture and its

visual representations. In comparison to Cat’ s Eye, Lady Oracle explores to a larger extent the

role and consequences of the present state of commercial photography on the individual’s life

and for this reason, the analysis will concern mainly, mass culture.

One of the messages which the novel passes on to its readers is that mass culture is apt to

pervade the collective imaginary. First of all, it proliferates images that are designed, or at least,

that have the potential to bear upon the development of gender identity. Seeing as, from the 19th

century and onwards, ocularcentrism progressed rapidly and established itself in the Western

society, mass culture’ s use of visual media to promote certain attitudes, appearances and desires

over others makes its influence on the way the individual perceives the world more effective.

Secondly, as it is reflected in Lady Oracle, the artificiality of visual representations lies, in the

public’s eyes, behind a veil of realness as an entire movie industry works to make its images look

authentic. As Atwood suggests in the novel, the artificiality of mass-produced images becomes at

a closer and more observant look visible. Moreover, the novel points to various cultural codes

that were used in the development of the recurrent images which are intrinsic to mass cultural

productions (movies, magazines and advertisements).

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The manner in which fashion influences the cognitive process of both men and women

proves Millet’s theory of internal colonization as the concepts and images which can be found on

the pages of women’s magazines and which are detrimental in the development of female

identity are taken in and incorporated:

Like advertising, women’s magazines have moved from the didactic to the

hallucinatory. Originally their purpose was informational, but what we see today

in both popular journalism and advertising is the mirage of a way of being, and

what we engage in is no longer only the relatively simple process of direct

imitation, but the less conscious one of identification (Wilson qtd. in White 2000:

29).

Fashion is one of the examples that show that the ‘real’ is molded to a high degree by the

visual representations that are proper to popular culture. The pictures leave their strong imprint

on people’ s imaginary along with the ideas which they stand for. In relation to this, Mitchell

informs us about Wittgenstein’s view on the misunderstanding of mental imagery. Wittgenstein

insisted that mental images should not be looked upon as “private, metaphysical, immaterial

entities any more than real images are” (Wittgenstein qtd. in Mitchell 1986: 15). Joan’s mother’s

desire to bring into her physical life images of femininity which were taken from popular culture

material, proves the effect that a picture (one that does not necessarily have direct connection

with nature) can alter the material world. Thus, such images fit into “the same logical space

(Mitchell 1986: 18)”. The boundaries between imaginary representations and real life material

objects or subjects begin to be blurred. Mass culture’ s ongoing power in forming Western

perception of reality finds its exemplification in Hollywood’ s mechanisms for promoting its

visual representations. The features of a star are believed to be authentic and natural and the fact

that a celebrity is a product of an industry is being overlooked. Gamson uses the phrase

“assembly line” to describe Hollywood’ s practice of turning its celebrities’ features marketable.

A celebrity is, in basic terms, a person who has gained the awe and attention of the masses.

According to Gamson, a critic who recorded the development of Hollywood industry starting

with the forties, the consumers of mass culture became “ simultaneous voyeurs of and

performers in commercial culture” ( Gamson qtd in Cashmore 2006: 64).

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In this case, it is not only the prevailing societal norms and cultural codes that give the

recurrent images in Hollywood movies an appearance of genuineness, it is also the mechanism

behind the production of such images. Ellis Cashmore refers to Gamson’ s explanation of

Hollywood’ s manufacturing process and notes that the studios relied on their ability to obscure

their own rationale and to hide the artifice behind the making of their stars because otherwise

“the entire narrative would have been collapsed” ( Cashmore 2006: 65). Nevertheless, the images

proliferated through this industry hold within them a set of cultural codes which the public is

prone to apply to its own life. Through publicity images, advertising constructs ideas of what it

means to lead an “improved” life. Berger uses the term “spectator-buyer” to refer to the

consumer who buys objects which are visually constructed to support a certain life style. Behind

the makings of visual images for mass consumption lies the drive of “publicity to make the

spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life” (Berger 2008: 142). As a female

character who is unsatisfied with her present condition ( dissatisfaction which occurs every time

she realizes that her appearance breaks certain patterns), Joan says that she “was a sucker for ads,

especially those that promised happiness” (Atwood 2009: 28). The objectives of advertising are

thusly met because the consumer is ready to change features of his/her personality to find the

promoted happiness. Such images impel one to feel dissatisfied with oneself and at the same

time, they claim to offer a better alternative to one’s own self. The spectator-buyer takes issue,

Not with the way of life of the society, but with his own within it. It suggests that

if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an

improved alternative to what he is (Berger 2008: 141).

In relation to the female viewer, the images within publicity contain visual guidelines

which impel her to want to change what she has. In the following quote, the narrator puts before

the reader a visual pattern of femininity which is typical of comic books, with a special emphasis

on the ones marketed for women. The passage shows the particularities of representations of

femininity along with the visions of female identity which their producers diffuse in their efforts

to steer and control behavior. As it is shown below, in trying to visually represent femininity, the

neatness of the physical aspect is the most salient feature:

I never learned to cry with style, silently, the pearl-shaped tears rolling down my

cheeks from wide luminous eyes, as on the cover of True Love comics, leaving no

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smears or streaks. I wish I had; then I could have done it in front of people (2009:

6).

Additionally, Joan questions the icon of the goddess, which left its deep mark on Western

society’ s collective imaginary. In Lady Oracle, Atwood draws attention to what she called the

“absolute obsession in Western’ s society with the shape of women’ s bodies in terms of fatness

and thinness” (Atwood qtd. in Kuhn 2005: 38). Slimness is a feature of the goddess figure which

is also extensively employed in popular culture representations. When the Polish Count, Joan’s

boyfriend, tells her that she looks like a goddess, she asks herself:

But which goddess did he mean? There was more than one, I knew. The one on

the Venus pencil package, with no arms and all covered with cracks. Some

goddesses didn’t have bodies at all[…]Many were shaped like vases, many like

stones. (Atwood 2009: 153)

As popular culture is inspired to a large extent by commonplace ideas of gender identity,

the widely accepted ideal of feminine beauty functions as the hub of its visual representations of

gender features. For instance, from the point of view of physical aspect the thinness of the female

body is a general expectation which is based on cultural codes. Joan’s mother, Fran was in a

constant effort for being “in shape” which entailed a slender figure and symmetrical features.

Her efforts grew more overbearing as she desired to be “an attractive woman, even into her late

thirties” (Atwood 2009: 67). Popular culture’ s effect on an individual’ s actions and behavior is

reflected by the form one’s body takes when one is forced by one’s society to control body

image by (un)written dictates which are found in mass culture material. In relation to this,

Winkel informs us that “fashion disciplines the body and subjects it to the reign of signs while

promising a better, upgraded life – a process that is described as ‘imprisonment-through-

liberation’”(Winkel qtd in Zarzycka 2009: 156). The use of fashion for putting across ideas for a

good lifestyle entails the employment of a number of cultural discourses on the self. In the same

chapter, Zarzycka argues that the increasing fragmentation of the body in contemporary

commercial photography causes the female body to be “packaged and commodified” and

“fashion in itself is the primal space where men look at women and women watch themselves

being looked at” (2009: 155). A reflection of this status quo is Fran’s photograph from her youth,

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which is described by the narrator as being one of the mementos of her mother’ s past which was

dear to her. The photograph where she was surrounded by men who were looking at her while

she was looking at the camera is not a fashion photograph but it is very suggestive of the

previously mentioned theories on fashion industry and the female body. Considering that she was

a woman who rigorously applied consumerist norms to herself and her daughter, she stands as an

embodiment of fashion dictates. As such, the photo weighs heavily when the effects of this

aspect of mass culture ( i.e. fashion industry) on both the female body and identity are evaluated.

Fran was a woman who incessantly sought to stay “fit” and who liked to be regarded with

pleasure and to receive the approval of her peers.

It was shown above that, in the novel, the commodification of the female body is reflected

by the actions of Joan’s mother, the avid consumer of commercial culture and more specifically

of magazines which dictated the norms for female appearance and behavior. Furthermore,

emphasizing the recollections of Lady Oracle’s narrator, we can deduce that if visual art can

become an object to be consumed, the female body undergoes the same process, because it is

shaped according to popular culture material. As regards her body and the part of herself that she

presented to the world, the narrator tells us that her mother was to be the manager, the creator,

the agent and she was the product(Atwood 2009: 68). The reader is informed that with

acknowledging the status of commodity comes her desire for freedom: “ but I reacted to the diet

booklets she left on my pillow, to the bribes of dresses she would give me if I would reduce to fit

them – formal gowns with layers of tulle and wired busts, perky little frocks, skirts with slim

waists and frothy crinolines” (Atwood 2009: 71) . This exemplifies that she needed to be aware

of the external forces which were meant to shape her mind and body in order for her to know

what she was resisting against. In Lady Oracle, retrospection is treated in the same way as in

Cat’s Eye and Surfacing; as a process which makes the characters more able to attain a certain

degree of self-awareness which helps them assess and then resist against imposed manners of

perceiving the world.

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fig. 2.1. Kruger, Barbara. Your Body Is a Battleground. 1989. The Broad Art Foundation,

Santa Monica.

In the chapter from Joan’s childhood when she wanted to take part in a ballet recital,

Margaret Atwood touches upon the feminist topic of criticism on the state of the female body in

a consumerist society, a topic which gained strength in the eighties. In the spirit of this criticism,

Barbara Kruger did an artwork where word and image work together to convey a message.

Kruger focused her works on the relationship between the consumer and the representations

which he/she is influenced by (arthistoryarchive.com). The photo shows a woman’s face overlaid

by a message saying that: “Your body is a battleground”(fig.1.1). The picture which is

juxtaposed by collages of words is seen as a way of bringing to surface the struggle between

maintaining subjectivity and surrendering to external influences. The idealized female body

becomes an epitome of this struggle. The photograph of the woman is divided into a negative

photographic material and its developed version, revealing two opposite states. This relates to

Joan’s predicament because she sees herself split between what she wants to be and what others

want her to be. In addition, Gen Doy theorizes that in this cultural environment “active

subjectivity” is superseded by “ a more passive, consumerist self-fashioning” (19). From this

quote, I consider Kuhn’ s term “self-fashioning” a key term because it brings into discussion the

cultural patterns(those that are fashionable) which one applies to one’s own body. As Margaret

Atwood notes:

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I think that people very much experience themselves through their bodies and

through concepts of the body which get applied to their own bodies. Which they

pick up from their own culture and apply to their bodies (Atwood qtd. in Kuhn

2005: 38).

The line between pure desire, uninfluenced by external factors, is practically invisible.

Being vulnerable to the multitude of images of consumerist fashion, turns the task of defining

agency difficult. Since childhood Joan had been easily influenced by the images she saw in

advertisements. Moreover, she wanted the pink dresses which girls who were taking ballet

lessons were wearing. Joan scours through these recollections to find out what reasons she had to

desire something that she was unable to incorporate. Firstly, she goes through a struggle to

define her identity to the extent to which she can, and then, when she grows up to be a teenager

she finds a more sound definition of her selfhood, only to have it counteracted by her mother.

On this battleground, there is a fight of the individual to maintain a sense of selfhood.

Selfhood is in Kristeva’ s view, dependent on the presence of the abject: “There is no selfhood

without a simultaneous abjection” (Kristeva qtd. in Doy 2005: 65). Thus, the abject represents

something that is produced outside the “bounded envelope” where “the socialized and

culturalised subject is continually producing itself” (Doy 2005: 65). In Joan’s case, stepping over

those socially-created boundaries which concerned the female body, disobeying the rules of her

social environment was something repellant. Her ballerina teacher pushes her to wear a suit

which was shaped as a mothball. She had to wear a sign where the word “mothball” was written

in case the audience did not recognize what her costume signified. Among the girls dressed as

butterflies and flowers, she had to embody an object which is used as a repellant against moths.

The moments from her life when she desired to be a ballerina but couldn’t because of her

body tell the reader a lot about the mainstream convictions on the relationship between body and

self. Wearing pink skirts and leggings, pieces of clothing that displayed her legs was seen as

grotesque while her body was deemed inappropriate to be shown on stage. As the teacher did not

want to disobey cultural codes (which informed people about the way a girl should appear in a

ballet scene) or to disappoint the public’s expectations, she considered that the costume which 

covered her excess of bodily weight was more acceptable.

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The problem was fairly simple in the short pink skirt with my waist arms and legs

exposed, I was grotesque. I am reconstructing this from the point of view of an

adult, an anxious, prudish adult like my mother or Mrs. Flegg(Atwood 2009: 44-

45).

In these passages, Atwood points to the anxiety of passing over the boundaries and the

regulations of one’s social environment. As we have seen, the thoughts of a negative response

from the audience seemed dreadful to them and the fear of losing the audience because of Joan’s

appearance on stage impelled them to take measures. From the perspective of the outsider(i.e.

Joan), this anxiety manifests itself when she protests against the treatment she has to endure

because of the state of her body. Gen Doy talks about the practice of making tattoos and she

quotes Susan Benson who said that in tattoo-making practice “what seems to be central is the

fear of fragmentation, anxiety about boundaries and about the relationship between will and self;

the body is the battleground in which such anxieties are played out” (Benson qtd. in Doy 2005:

70). When she is put on stage to perform the mothball dance, she gets into character but insists

on playing it in the way in which she chooses. While she was performing the dance, she was

trying to convince herself that the public’s view of herself was not in accordance with her

perspective of herself:

"This isn't me," I kept saying to myself, "they're making me do it"; yet even

though I was concealed in the teddy-bear suit, which flopped about me and made

me sweat, I felt naked and exposed, as if this ridiculous dance was the truth about

me and everyone could see it (Atwood 2009: 49).

However, as the final lines show, she had doubts whether the manner in which she

envisioned herself was accurate or flawed. This crisis of subjectivity and the problem of the self

are transposed into literature by Margaret Atwood in a manner that reflects what Mansfield said

about the theorization of subjectivity “as a cultural phenomena in its own right” ( Doy 2005: 63).

In a quote provided by Gen Doy in the chapter “Bodies and Selves”, the idea that comes across is

that theorizing the self leads one into a paradox because, while all around us ideas on the

importance of an original self circulate, theories on this concept point to its frail existence:

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the subject has had its meaning endlessly theorised and proliferated only after

being declared dead. In other words, the subject has become an absolutely intense

focus of theoretical anxiety at the same time as it is said to be over… everywhere

in our art, our entertainment, our popular psychology and journalism, the self is

represented as absolutely important but somehow insubstantial, even absent

(Mansfield qtd. in Doy 2005: 63-64).

As such, in order to comprehend the nature of subjectivity in present-day society, one

must focus on conventional standards, particularly when they relate to visual culture. With all its

references to movies and magazines, Lady Oracle contains passages which come across as a

critique of commercial culture because, by means of it, values of humanity which remain

uncontested by the admass circulate on a roll. They are set beyond any question because they are

inspired by cultural codes and at the same time, they help spread those codes. In this respect,

conformism is one of the key themes of the novel, because Joan’ s mother, the character which

has the heaviest influence in Joan’ s life follows some “acceptable” patterns of behavior in a

strict manner. Conventionality is one of the character’s traits as she wants everything that

surrounds her to be fitting to particular social rules. This character’s tendency is epitomized by

the state of her house, more specifically by her living room. Being a place which is designed to

receive guests and which is open to the eyes of others, the living room has a significant role in

the character analysis of the mother. First of all, Joan mentions that the woman wanted her living

rooms to be “acceptable” and designing them was a method through which she could gain social

acceptance. Secondly, being acceptable also meant creating a space which was the same as

everybody else’s; this description of her mother’ s desires conveys the idea of conformism. This

socially acceptable and conformist environment, which her mother built seemed to the narrator

like a museum display or most importantly like the show windows of department stores. The

latter object of comparison for the above-mentioned living rooms reveal the consumerist

practices that were dominant in Joan’ s home by virtue of her mother’ s actions.

In the context of such culturally coded icons, Joan is trying to be able to get a clearer view

of her identity. Among such visual representations as the ones listed above, the individual

becomes alienated and develops feelings of inappropriateness. Joan is surrounded by ideal

images of femininity and does not want to comply with them but at the same time she feels like

36

an odd fish and a deficient person. The induced desires which the Hollywood industry pushes

through are reflected in the passages where Joan narrates the days when she went with her aunt

to the cinema. When she talks about the movies which she saw in her childhood, she declares: “I

wanted those things too, I wanted to dance and be married with a handsome orchestra conductor-

and when she finally threw herself in front of a train I let out a bellowing snort that made people

three rows ahead turn around indignantly” (Atwood 2009: 84).

This immediately brings about Joan’s alienation as she puts forward the idea that she was

invisible or detestable to those who were supposed to be her peers or to the people around her

because she did not fit within the widely accepted (visual) patterns. In her childhood her body

was different and in relation to this, she asks herself: “If Desdemona was fat who would care

whether or not Othello strangled her?” (Atwood 2009: 51). One can notice culture being

transferred in contemporary times into the construction of mass images whether they are found in

movies, advertisements or in commercial photograph which is supplied on the pages of a

magazine marketed for female consumers. One can argue that mass culture is involved

extensively with appearance rather than substance. When Joan achieved fame, she realized that

she had to do something about her hair because its “ length and color had been a sort of

trademark. Every newspaper clipping, friendly or hostile, had mentioned it, in fact a lot of space

has been devoted to it: hair in the female was regarded as more important than either talent or

lack of it” (Atwood 2009: 11). However, as these passages show, along with the above-

mentioned observations on the female body as a battleground, it is mostly the women who are

required to concentrate on their looks, bearing and expression. The reader is also presented with

a passage from a newspaper where Joan is compared to a “lush Rossetti portrait, radiating

intensity, [and] hypnotized the audience with her unearthly…” (Atwood 2009: 11). In connection

to these passages, it is important to note what Berger says about the female viewers of a painting,

namely that “they survey, like men, their own femininity” (Berger 2008: 63). Thus, Joan

modeled herself to get a positive response from a public which, as it is implied in the description

of the newspaper, nostalgically looked back to conventional representations of femininity similar

to those made by a Pre-Raphaelite painter. As we will see in Cat’s Eye, such female

representations were devised to please a male gaze. The descriptions from Lady Oracle

encompass some of the main features of a Pre-Raphaelite portrait: “unearthly” aspects, “flowing

37

red hair”, “green robe” and “intensity.” In addition, a Pre-Rapahaelite female figure is there to

entice the male viewer and to be “surveyable”:

Prose poetess looked impressively Junoesque in her flowing red hair and green

robe; unfortunately she was largely inaudible (Atwood 2009: 11).

Such examples show Joan’s awareness of the external forces that controlled her life and

consequently, she wants her death to be the result of individual agency in action. At the same

time, she stages it so that she can maintain a certain public image.  Through her self-

contemplation, Joan is searching in a roundabout way for a core self that could be able to emerge

without any external influence which turns out to be a Sisyphean task. In this case, I will refer to

the mother as to the embodiment of the constrictive social norms which set the narrator back in

her quest for self-determination. The images that she tried to enforce on her daughter were not

connected to nature and Joan’ s inability to apply them to her own situation demonstrates their

artificiality. Moreover, it was not a matter of lacking ability to do it, it was an example of

resistance. Nevertheless, Joan’ s mother/society stubbornly appreciated this artificial state for the

fact that it was simply not viewed as such. Instead it was thought of as the proper way in which a

person should order his/her life. During her teenage years she came to the realization that she

wants a lifestyle which is different from the one which was planned by her mother/society and

she refused to withdraw in her attempts to achieve it. As such, the mental image that her

mother/society had concerning her femininity did not go hand in hand with the way in which she

construed herself.

Furthermore, despite her lack of conformity she falls into the trap of self-disgust. Thus,

her situation tells us once again that the individual who does not want to abide by conventions,

who is persistent in maintaining a self that does not fit within conventionality is bound to

develop feelings of inappropriateness. As much as mass culture gives the impression that

following conventions is a recipe for blissful living, the novel comes to prove this idea wrong.

Joan is not the only character who is unsatisfied because of limitations. Her mother who

determinedly follows them feels a certain form of dissatisfaction because as she tries to compose

herself, her sadness comes to surface. It is a different way of reacting to the pressures which

conventions bring along with them. As Joan’ s mother was trying to put on her make-up, she was

falling into glum: “ Instead of making her happier, these sessions make her sadder, as if she was

38

behind or within the mirror some fleeting image of who she was unable to capture or duplicate“

(Atwood 2009: 67). While she openly accepted this activity of self-examination, she did not

experience fulfillment. Joan realized in the final stages of the novel that her mother’s disregard

for her was a cause of her own sense of discontent. She was a housewife that did not have a full

grasp of her own self (which, at this point in the novel, was an older self) as she continuously

insisted on following patterns for her appearance.

While the narration develops, Joan is getting closer to finding out one significant aspect

of her identity. Her aunt’ s words “ you can’t always choose your life, but you can learn to accept

it “ signal the resolution of the novel when Joan realizes that she took after her mother in more

ways than she thought and by doing so, she digs up certain features of her personality which she

discarded so far. The beginning describes Joan’ s “planned death”, a staged suicide that had the

purpose of distancing her from the judgment of others, bringing her to a small town in Italy. She

envisioned her life: “meander[ing] along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to

control it. “My life had a tendency to spread, to get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of

a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance” (Atwood 2009: 1).

Preferably, she wanted her death “to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a

Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls much praised by fashion

magazines when I was fifteen” (Atwood 2009: 1). In the end, when her trick unravels she

achieves detachment from what were considered to be her flaws and she states : “I made a mess;

but then, I don’t think I’ll be a very tidy person” ( Atwood 2009: 375). Thus, through the

awareness which she gained by remembering the visual and social patterns which defined her

gender, neatness in conformity began to be irrelevant to her life.

3. Visual Culture and Memory in Margaret Atwood’ s Cat’s Eye

Lady Oracle is a novel that presents the pressures of an individual who lives in a

consumer society infused with norms that are upheld by a conformist majority. Whereas in Lady

Oracle the act of remembering moments from the main character’s past entailed the realization

of the effects of visual culture on identity, the narrator and protagonist of Cat’ s Eye employs

visual media to make memories which formed her selfhood emerge. While I continue my

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analysis of visual representations in popular culture and the discussions on contemporary

consumerist society which are sparked by the practice of commercial artists, I direct my attention

towards the relation between art and memory. The commercial visual practices are still analyzed

but the discussion will be centered on the relation between photographs, modern and classic

paintings and memory. In Cat’ s Eye painting is a form of bringing to the surface elements of her

unconscious and writing is a way of laying bare the effects which those elements had on the

construction of herself.

Atwood speaks about the relation between media and art and about how paintings and

images are used in a contemporary consumerist society. This novel encompasses the

characteristics of Atwood’s fiction that have been listed in the introductory chapter: the visual

artwork as commodity, the female presence in visual culture as alluring force, the identification

of women with publicity images. As I will show, it also presents the female artist character who

is engaged with the world and who directs her gaze at it. Most importantly, it deals with the

iconography of women and it explores the relation between selfhood, memory and the visual

arts.

The narrator and main character of the story comes back to her hometown and her

narration goes back and forth through time, from Elaine’s childhood to her adult years. Elaine is

a modern artist and her works are either hand-drawn or collages which are made from other

visual materials which she regards as molding forces of her identity and of the other female

characters’ identity. As a painter, she brings forward a description of commercial art by means of

which she explains that art is generally thought of in terms of its market value. More often than

not, it captures attention through the sensationalism which encircles it and less through its

aesthetics. In relation to this, Elaine ironically asks herself if the act of cutting her ear would

draw more people to buy her artworks. These passages reveal what Barrett theorized about the

artistic process and practice, namely that “the logic of [such] practice is obscured by the

commodification of the work as object” (Barrett 2011: 45). Elaine’s paintings are described by

her as objects whose buyers equate ownership with creation:

Whoever owns them is not me; worse luck, I’d get a better price now. The

owners’ names will be on little white cards beside the paintings, along with mine,

as if mere ownership is on a par with creation. Which they think it is (Atwood

2009: 100).

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Considering this tendency to increasingly commodify the artwork, Barrett emphasizes the

need to develop a “metalanguage of interpretation in order to recuperate, at least partially, the

logic of practice that is lost once the work is subsumed into the logic of the symbolic and of

institutional discourses” ( Barrett 2011: 45). In Cat’s Eye, the narrator gives an example of how

the value of a work increases as it has a story behind it. In the passages that refer ironically to

contemporary tendencies in evaluating a work of art (for example, the huge response to Van

Gogh’s ear cutting), sensationalism gives a different significance to the work of art: “What rich

art collectors like to buy, among many things, is a little vicarious craziness” (Atwood 2009: 100).

The explanation for such a response is given by Barrett who says that “the reception of an

artwork does not occur in a vacuum, but is embedded in various discourses that frame audience

responses” ( 2009: 107). The idea of creating material by concentrating on its financial feasibility

can be found in Lady Oracle as well. As such, the point which both novels share is that a

particular object which is designed to enforce certain (un)written rules regarding behavior and/or

aspect gives up substance in favor of conformity to market demands.

Margaret Atwood’s literary depictions of visual culture span the so-called low and high

art. In Cat’s Eye, she talks about various moments in pictorial tradition: Pre-Raphaelite and early

Renaissance, and adds to them popular culture examples. In an ekphrastic manner, she briefly

describes Van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Marriage”, an object of interest for Elaine from the period when

she was an art student. From the painting which depicts in foreground a couple holding hands,

the point on which she focuses her attention is the mirror reflection of another figure that faces

the couple. The convex mirror is placed in the background and even though its position would

not be of interest, it draws attention through its different nature:

These figures reflected in the mirror are slightly askew, as if a different law of

gravity, a different arrangement of space, exists inside, locked in, sealed up in the

glass as if in a paperweight. This round mirror is like an eye, a single eye that sees

more than anyone else looking: over this mirror is written, Johannes de Eyck fuit

hic. 1434. (Atwood 2009: 382-383).

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Fig.3.1. Eyck, Jan van. Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife. 1434. National

Gallery. London.

In addition to her literary representations of classical paintings, Atwood discusses the

values and concepts which commercial artists are prone to use in their artworks. The students of

Advertising Art are described by Elaine as more neatly looking than the ones at Fine Arts.

Unlike the students from Fine Arts, they give a higher importance to the financial feasibility of

their works so that they could be able to earn their money: “they’re cleaner and more earnest, and

they want paying jobs. So do I” (Atwood 2009: 383). Cat’s Eye contains a theme which will be

more extensively explored in the 3rd chapter, which is the mass media’ s transference of old

visual practices of representing different concepts into its present-day images. She experiences

the revelation that her boyfriend insisted in modeling her by the style of a typical Pre-Raphaelite

character when she notices her altered appearance as she gazes at herself in the elevator mirror.

Moments like these reveal that retrospection and introspection are two interrelated and

interdependent acts which help the individual clarify questions related to his/her personality.

With regard to gendered visual representations, Cat’s Eye provides an instance of mental

imagery related to the female body which is transposed into everyday reality. As I mentioned

before, Elaine’s lover Joseph wanted her to look like a Pre-Raphaelite character. Through these

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passages, the theories of the gaze are brought into discussion. Hengen argues that the much

contested power of patriarchy is “to hold the gaze in which woman is seen only as man would

see her, in his image, or as a mirror reflection of his gaze” (1993: 34-35). Furthermore, what the

product of an extensively admired and studied art movement like the Pre-Raphaelite does is to

include the idea of women as alluring forces into the common social and cultural understanding

of femininity. In this context, femininity will be defined in patriarchal terms and women will

contribute to forming themselves by bearing in mind the male gaze. As the novel shows, the

model in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition has an influence on the mentality of the 20th century. As

shown in the following passages, the representation of femininity which recurred in the Pre-

Raphaelite paintings is up to this day transferred into reality; it has within it the pose and other

features of the Pre-Raphaelite model which were created to pass on particular ideas of

femininity.

Although it can be argued that, by choosing nature as the portraits’ setting, the female

characters are placed in a more open environment instead of a closed domestic one, the

sensuality that their characters effuse breeds another stereotype of women as enticing figures and

femininity in Pre-Raphaelite paintings is equal to enchantment. The same stereotype is present in

contemporary mass culture. Glamour, a word which is much encountered in the fashion

vocabulary, denotes magic as well. “Even in contemporary life, individuals become deeply and

irrationally attached to various items of clothing so that the items become talismanic” (Kuhn

2005: 42). In Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, glamour is defined as “ the exciting

and charming quality of something unusual or special, with a magic power of attraction”.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary(1961), the archaic version referred to “magic,

enchantment, spell ” . The characters in the paintings are slim and they are rendered through the

use of colors such as fiery red which is set against a green background. Their faces are pale and

their dresses are fading in the atmosphere. In this passage, it is shown that Elaine took in such

features:

My hair is loose, and damp. I think it looks like a mop. But I catch a glimpse of

myself, without expecting it, in the smoked-mirror wall of the elevator as we go

up, and I see for an instant what Josef sees: a slim woman with cloudy hair,

pensive eyes in a thin white face. I recognize the style: late nineteenth century.

Pre-Raphaelite. I should be holding a poppy (Atwood 2009: 359).

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When Josef arranges her according to his vision or mental image of femininity, he asks

her to loosen her hair and he concludes that after this, she resembles a gypsy. The latter

association led him to think of an existence unfettered by various norms as, in Western

imaginary, it signifies nomadism. This is an instance of what Winkel calls in relation to the

fashion system “imprisonment-through-liberation” (Winkel qtd. in Zarzycka 2009: 156). As

such, the female presence is highly sensualized to delight the male gaze, having as a result the

regulation of the female body. On the basis of Prettejohn’ s argument, one can note that in Pre-

Raphaelite tradition the role of women was reorganized, giving a false sense of emancipation:

the beloved bride tendency in late Pre-Raphaelite art represents a move from

seeing female excellence as spiritual, with its emphasis on domesticity, grace and

purity to seeing female excellence in terms of physical beauty, an embodiment of

male heterosexual desire (1999: 179).

fig.3.2. Solomon, Simeon. Priestess Offering Poppies.1894. Oil on Canvas. Leicester

Galleries, Leicester.

Like in the case of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, in a publicity image pieces of clothing are

not merely objects, they exist to sell a certain “look” or fashionably acceptable appearance.

Moreover, the narrator of Cat’s Eye describes the prevailing popular products of a given time

and highlights that attitudes are in accordance with the aesthetic values of those products. Elaine

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is in the habit of gathering popular culture visual material for the production of her works. As a

student, the images which stirred her interest seemed to be reproduced from shopping catalogues:

“[…] what have I done so far? Nothing that doesn’t look like a random sampling from Eaton’s

catalogue. But I keep on” (Atwood 2009: 383). However, this fascination with popular culture’ s

images does not make her a passive consumer. On the contrary, she challenges the values which

are disseminated by them. While she passes by stores and looks around at the trends of teenagers

she notices their imitation of fashion images and she ponders on the specificities of each

generation’s popular style: “What are they aiming for? Is each an imitation of the other? Or does

it only seem that way to me because they’re all so alarmingly young? Despite their cool poses

they wear their cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. They want it all” (Atwood

2009: 132). The compulsive preoccupation of fitting within publicity images and the obsession

for a youthful appearance takes the form of religion, of “Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in

it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top

glue” (Atwood 2009: 133). This quote reiterates the idea that glamour signifies enchantment.

The desire to fit within a fashionable appearance obliterates completely the notion of a

selfhood untouched by popular systems of belief. Nevertheless, authenticity of character has not

been completely lost and, at times, it shyly surfaces. The evasiveness with which a sales person

answers Elaine’s question if she likes the type of perfume that she is selling shows that market

demands are based on certain patterns:

The stuff smells like grape Kool-Aid. I can’t imagine it seducing anything but a

fruit fly.[…]“You like this?” I say to the girl. […]“It’s been very popular,” she

says evasively. Briefly I glimpse myself through her eyes: bloom off the rose,

teetering on the brink of matronhood, hoping for the best. I am the

market(Atwood 2009: 133).

In accordance with the other two novels of this dissertation, Cat’s Eye is involved with

the early formative years of an individual’s life and for this reason the images which the main

character was exposed to during her childhood are under a particular focus. In Cat’s Eye the

construction of the character’s selfhood is credited to the female characters from her childhood,

each one leaving their presence engraved on her personality. The female characters which

emerge in her paintings are key players in the development of her identity. The events whose

45

course was more often than not directed by these particular characters are also crucial and the

tools which she uses to understand the events and characters are of a visual nature. A lot of

attention is given to the housewife icon which, in this novel, is found on the pages of the

magazines which Elaine uses for her collages. The characters on which she focuses her works are

thought of in terms of conventional visual representations of women. To render them she often

uses collages with material that she gathers from magazines. Because she grew up in the forties,

her artworks include a variety of commercial visual material from the magazines of that period.

In one of Elaine’s collages, her mother is envisioned as the embodiment of the housewife

icon which was created by the magazines of that time. She explains the visual representations of

her mother as they could be found in her paintings. The description of her artworks starts with a

hand-drawn image with colored pencils and continues with the collage which was gathered from

various magazines. The magazines which she chose for the purpose of visually rendering her

mother were, as their titles hint, magazines marketed for women: Ladies’ Home Journals and

Chatelaines.

Sometimes I cut things out of magazines and paste them into a scrapbook with

LePage’s mucilage, from the bottle that looks like a chess bishop. I cut out

pictures of women, from Good Housekeeping, The Ladies’ Home Journal,

Chatelaine. If I don’t like their faces I cut off the heads and glue other heads on.

These women have dresses with puffed sleeves and full skirts, and white aprons

that tie very tightly around their waists(Atwood 2009: 163).

Elaine offers a description of the dresses which the women in magazines used to wear: the

puffed sleeves, white aprons tight around the waist. In the 1940s, the pages of the above-

mentioned magazines contained pencil-drawn designs of ladies’ clothes wear. In the picture

below(fig.2.2), the palette coincides with the collage through which the narrator depicts her

mother. Elaine describes the pictures that she gathered with the purpose of visually representing

her mother: “the artwork, with those rancid greens and faded blues and dirty looking pinks”

(2009: 170) which were the colors for women’s dresses of that period(fig 2.2). They also have

the extra-slim waists which Elaine is talking about when she remembers the fashion tendencies

of the period in which she grew up:

46

It’s incredible to me that I myself was alive when all those chalk things were

going on, all those statistical deaths. I was alive when women wore those

ridiculous clothes with the big shoulder pads and the nipped-in waists, with

peplums over their bums like backward aprons. I draw a woman with wide

shoulders and a picture hat (Atwood 2009: 279).

The visual means through which the housewife image is constructed is fortified/increased

by the texts that went along with the visual. To show the complications which arise when one has

to be convinced to accept certain values, Elaine indicates to the reader that her mother was

reluctant in adopting the housewife status which was advertized by the popular culture of her

period: “The first was my mother in colored pencil, in her city house kitchen and her late-forties

dress. Even she had a bib apron, blue flowers with navy piping, even she wore it, from time to

time” (Atwood 2009: 170). By the use of the words “even she”, one notices a contrast between

what was represented in the magazines and her mother’s identity. Unlike the other significant

female influence in her life, Mrs. Smeath, she did not enjoy conforming to norms and did not

display passivity.

Fig. 3.3. Australian Home Journal. August 1949.

Coming back to Elaine’s early artistic method of merely copying popular culture’s visual

pieces, one can argue that it exemplifies Barret’s view on “the excessive demands of consumer

culture and the speed and distraction of contemporary life [which] leave little opportunity for

47

nurturing imaginative capacities” (2011: 77). Nevertheless, as Elaine matures she employs a

different artistic practice of transferring the negative energy which was triggered by one or a

chain of events from her life into art. In Kristeva’s theories on creative practice and the artist’s

achievement of moral relief, affect is “ a structuring of psychic space that through creative

practice attributes value and valency to experience and is transferred to the audience via artworks

(Barrett 4).” Affect is a term that refers to inner manifestations or “archaic energy signals

initially occurring as undifferentiated ‘intensities’” (Barrett 2011: 159) which come to surface as

emotions or feelings that will finally be transposed into an artwork. As many of Atwood’s female

characters, Mrs. Smeath is a haunting presence which undoubtedly had an effect on Elaine’ s

self-esteem. She emerges on canvas but the explanation for the impact that this character had on

the painter is revealed through language. The paintings in the novel do not have a

correspondence in real life, as they are framed within the literary work, being the results of

notional ekphrasis. In John Hollander’ s term, notional ekphrasis is the “representation of an

imaginary work of art” ( Hollander qtd. in Heffernan 1993: 7). However, their description says

something about the significance of the visual in an individual’s life who in this case is a visual

artist. The visual serves the purpose of placing into the material world haunting memories. It is a

primary stage in the quest for finding out the source of frustration and anger. For example, after

Elaine makes the visual association between Mrs. Smeath and heaven, she goes on with relating

the time which she spent with this character. The painting of Mrs. Smeath comes across as the

result of a repressed memory from childhood : “The angels around her are 1940s Christmas

stickers, laundered little girls in white, with rag-set curly hair. The word Heaven is stenciled at

the top of the painting with a child’s school stencil set. I thought that was a nifty thing to do, at

the time” (Atwood 2009: 101). As a result of Elaine’s supposed religious convictions, she was

chastised by Mrs. Smeath and her family. As such, religion is given a particular attention in

Elaine’s visual works. Mrs. Smeath was a strongly religious and even doctrinal woman who

abided by Christian ideas of heaven and hell. She believed herself to be a “pure” soul and

regarded Elaine as a heathen and such self-righteousness became a reason for Elaine to dread her

presence:

I hate Mrs. Smeath, because what I thought was a secret, something going on

among girls, among children, is not one. It has been discussed before, and

tolerated. Mrs. Smeath has known and approved. She has done nothing to stop it.

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She thinks it serves me right.[…] She is right, I am a heathen. I cannot forgive

(Atwood 2009: 214).

On the basis of the description which is found in the passages where the narrator talks

about the Sundays which she spent with the Smeath family, Mrs. Smeath is represented in many

of Elaine’s paintings floating on air via heaven. One can see the connection between the mental

image which Elaine kept of Mrs. Smeath and her visual representation of this character. She

makes a connection between Mrs. Smeath extreme religiousness and madness (she was “grinning

like a maniac”) which shows us that at the moment when the painting was being done she

already detached herself from the harsh criticism which was directed towards her in her early

years; instead of maintaining the victim position one sees her with the status of active evaluator:

There are indeed three photos. One is of my head, shot a little from beneath so it

looks as if I have a double chin. The other two are of paintings. One is of Mrs.

Smeath, bare-naked, flying heavily through the air. The church spire with the

onion on it is in the distance. Mr. Smeath is stuck to her back like an asparagus

beetle, grinning like a maniac; both of them have shiny brown insect wings, done

to scale and meticulously painted. Erbug, The Annunciation, it’s called (Atwood

2009: 265-266).

In the same manner as in Lady Oracle conventionalism is an issue that brings about the

character’s feelings of inappropriateness. Mrs. Smeath is one the most conventional characters in

the novel and it is not surprising that she is also the character who is the most influential in her

paintings. As a child, she prompted in her feelings of unworthiness on grounds of her religion. In

addition, the old woman’s passivity recurs in her later paintings. Passivity is another key feature

of Mrs. Smeath and it is characteristic of the housewife icon. In comparison with the painter’ s

mother, Mrs. Smeath remains firm in her purpose of abiding by certain norms, a feature which

originates in her passion for religious codes. Her mother, on the other hand, does not comply

with her role of housewife which such an easiness as the activities that she does more often than

not bring her dissatisfaction.

However, feminist views on the state of the female body in visual arts are inspired by the

paintings of Mrs. Smeath. They hint at the conventional visual constructions of the body and

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highlight the tendency of painting it in an idealized manner. Jody, a member of the group of

feminist artists to which Elaine belonged for a period in her career, commended the character of

Mrs. Smeath for having an aging female body that was treated with respect: “’It’s woman as

anticheesecake,’ she said. ‘Why should it always be young, beautiful women? It’s good to see

the aging female body treated with compassion, for a change.’ This, only in more high-flown

language, is what she’s written in the catalogue” (Atwood 2009: 408). The last sentence reflects

the museum experience, where alongside paintings there is a need for text. The text which was

included in the catalogue of the exhibition pinpoints to a system of ideas which is always

attached to the visual piece. In this case, this system springs from feminist criticism on visual

artworks and it emphasizes the need for a de-idealization of the female body.

Next to the paintings of her mother and Mrs. Smeath, Elaine exhibits “a self-portrait of

sorts” entitled Cat’s Eye, where she placed herself in “the right foreground, though it’s shown

only from the middle of the nose up: just the upper half of the nose, the eyes looking outward,

the forehead and the topping of hair” (Atwood 2009: 480). It represents Elaine at maturity with

“the incipient wrinkles, the little chicken feet at the corners of the lids” (Atwood 2009: 480-481).

The setting of the painting is a snow covered field which resembles the place where Cordelia,

Grace and Carol left her to freeze. The painting displays an element which resembles the convex

mirror from the “The Arnolfini Marriage”.

Behind my half-head, in the center of the picture, in the empty sky, a pier glass is

hanging, convex and encircled by an ornate frame, In it, a section of the back of

my head is visible; but the hair is different, younger.[…] At a distance, and

condensed by the curved space of the mirror, there are three small figures, dressed

in the winter clothing of the girls of forty years ago. They walk forward, their

faces shadowed, against a field of snow (Atwood 2009: 480-481).

This literary depiction of an imaginary work of art uncovers the connection between past

and present and it reveals more clearly the role of memory in the construction of selfhood. The

three small figures are identified with Elaine’s childhood friends and tormentors, namely

Cordelia, Grace Smeath and Carol. It represents a defining moment of her childhood surfacing

on canvas. In it, the figure that faces its potential viewer is adult Elaine and in the convex mirror

is her younger version whose back is reflected. It is an example of a work of art which cannot be

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considered either spatial or temporal. Spatiality and temporality can blend rendering obsolete the

Western –produced binary opposition between the two concepts. Mitchell claims that “painting

expresses temporal action indirectly, by means of bodies; poetry represents bodily forms

indirectly, by means of actions” (1986: 101) and insists that “ works of art, like all other object of

human experience, are structures in space-time, and that the interesting problem is to

comprehend a particular spatial-temporal construction, not to label it as temporal or spatial”

(1986: 103). In this sense, in “Cat’s Eye” painting, the co-dependence between temporality and

spatiality is indicated by the setting (the snow field where she was left to freeze) and the bodies

(the three girls who were dressed like the girls from the forties, their form indicating that they

were the three friends from her past who left her to freeze in the snow).

In addition to revealing the central position which visual products hold within Western

society, Atwood focuses on personal photographs. This type of photograph does not require as

much planning as a commercial photograph does. It is taken for the purpose of recording

memorable but personal events, or to be reminded of the loved ones. Susan Sontag holds that

“photographs are more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not

a flow” (2005: 13) and “each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object

that one can keep and look at again” (2005: 13). The photo album helps Elaine fill in some

blanks that she had in relation to the formative events of her childhood; for example what was

happening during the time when she got her first camera. Even though a personal photograph is

less staged than a commercial photograph, because the photographer does not need to take into

consideration market demands and other social conditions which come along with the production

of a commercial picture, what appears on the plain surface is not an example of authenticity. The

photographer knows in advance what he/she wants to include in the picture. In relation to this,

Elaine tells the reader that before she presses the button she thinks “about how each picture will

look like” (Atwood 2009: 64).

While she browses through her photo album, Elaine sees her brother getting ready for a

snowball fight. After she goes through other photos from the album, she correlates her brother’s

gestures of calling her to a snowball fight with how Christmas time was celebrated in her family.

These passages go hand in hand with Woolf’s explanation of a photograph’s effect on our

minds; it testifies to the fact that “As the eye is connected to the brain [and] the brain to the

nervous system, this system sends it’s messages in a flash through every past memory and

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present feeling” (Woolf qtd. in Sontag 2004: 24). At this stage of her narration, between

remembering one of her Christmas celebrations and pondering on her childhood as a whole,

Elaine adds another picture to the story, one which was taken at a more mature stage of her life.

By doing so, she sees her evolution and recognizes her younger self as “a poorer, farther away,

ignorant version” of herself (2009: 64). Through these takes on the relation between photography

and memory, Atwood insists that there are gaps and other layers of reality which remain to be

found. For this reason, in Cat’s Eye, what happens beyond the frames of a photograph is exactly

what matters in the search for finding how identity has been built. Thus, the photographs help her

remember events and people, not because of their accurate representations of the way things

were but because of their resemblance to reality as some of the features of the subjects which are

photographed have a recognizable form.

The memory of childhood events which appear in Elaine’s visual pieces mirrors the

connection between temporality and spatiality in an artwork, as the painting “Cat’s Eye” which

was described in the paragraphs from above demonstrates. This echoes the idea from of the

novel’s first passages that time has a spatial dimension. This literary perspective on time stands

as a metaphoric rendering for the act of remembering. It also stands as a metaphor for the act of

looking deeper into the unconscious mind to find the memories and the events from the past

which were influential in one’s development:

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like

a series of liquid transparencies, one laid one top of another. You don’t look back

along time down though it, like water. Sometimes this comes to surface,

sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away(Atwood 2009: 1).

After going through childhood images and reevaluating her artwork, Elaine realized that

she had a series of mental pictures of how her life should evolve and what should happen at a

particular moment in time. The final tone is one of acceptance and the message is similar to Lady

Oracle, namely that we go through different experiences and our desires are gradually being

neutralized as life prevents us from transferring them into the real world: “This is what I miss,

Cordelia: not something that’s gone but something that will never happen. Two old women

giggling over their tea” (Atwood 2009: 498). In the end, after an examination of herself in

52

various instances from her life, Elaine was able to articulate the regrets which were submerged in

her unconscious.

In conclusion, the main character and narrator’s reflections on visual culture emphasize

its formative abilities. Cat’s Eye reveals that memory is the cognitive process through which

self-awareness is achieved because it implies the re-assessment of the external influences which

interfered in the formation of the main character and narrator’s identity.

4. Challenging Cultural Conditioning and Visual Images of Femininity in

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

By focusing on Atwood’s Surfacing, in this chapter I will discuss the importance of

challenging recurrent visual representations which are put forward by Western society’ s media.

As revealed by the condition of Surfacing’ s main character, such representations trigger feelings

of alienation and give rise to a crisis of identity. The main character and narrator of the novel

evolves from steering the course of her work by culturally acceptable patterns to going through a

process of renewal in nature. Additionally, as suggested in this novel, originality in an individual

emerges after the normative rules of behavior and appearance are being questioned.

One of the practices within Western contemporary culture which Atwood brings forward

through Surfacing is imitation: the copies of copies which are fabricated through commercial

production and the imitation of those commercial products which is carried on by each

individual. When the narrator arrives at her home town, she passes by the place of an old family

friend who owned a bar. In a visible location of this bar, he placed a photograph of a picturesque

scenery where there was a stream and a man fishing( 1979: 17). In reference to this photograph,

the narrator tells the reader that:

It's an imitation of other places, more southern ones, which are themselves

imitations, the original someone's distorted memory of a nineteenth century

English gentleman's shooting lodge, the kind with trophy heads and furniture

made from deer antlers, Queen Victoria had a set like that. But if this is what

succeeds why shouldn't they do it(1979: 17)?

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From the narrator’s perspective, photographs are a form of confinement. Before she

begins her cleansing process, she burns her family photo album describing how “the imitation

mother and father is turning to ashes” (1979: 130) and judging the photographs as “confining”

(1979: 130). Moreover, she tells the reader, at the beginning of her trip, that she used to “hate

standing still waiting for the click” (1979: 48) and after viewing her photo album she sees in it

“successive incarnations” (1979: 48) of herself. According to Susan Sontag, “to possess reality in

the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience unreality and remoteness of the real” (2005:

120), and the act of “deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another,

photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects” (2005: 4). Because they imply

poses, photographs have a substantial influence in the convention-making process and through

them the experience of reality becomes fainter. In this context of images produced by everlasting

conventions, the narrator’ s search to find her father transforms itself into a search for answers

into what it means to be an individual. In addition, the trip is full of attempts on her part to find a

self which would make her feel more satisfied, for “something [she] could recognize as

[herself]” (1979: 65). The visual images which formed her identity are brought forward so as to

be questioned. The theme of the return to one’s birthplace appears in Cat’s Eye as well. The trip

back home has the same function as in Surfacing, it stands for the uncovering of memories which

remained in the main character and narrator’s unconscious. The reader cannot identify the

narrator by any name and because the novel begins with a series of self-doubts and with a hardly

explainable feeling of melancholia, namelessness stands for the narrator’s lack of self-awareness.

By remembering and thinking about her past, the main character succeeds in surpassing the

dissatisfaction related to her life choices. Furthermore, by relinquishing the artificiality (which,

in fact, brought her to her present state) in favor of nature, or of a place in nature where the

presence of humans has been scarce, she is able to move forward with a more serene state of

mind.

This experience represents also a psychological journey into unknown places of the main

character and narrator’ s mind. Sue Thomas briefly describes in her article “Mythic

Reconception and the Mother/Daughter Relationship in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing” the

main objectives and purposes of the novel, namely the laying bare of the “psychological

processes, maturational crises and cultural conditioning which may lay waste the sexual self-

expression of women” while “draw[ing] together psychological, cultural and mythic dimensions

54

of human experience in her contemporary culture” (74). Cultural conditioning is the key term

with which I am concerned in this chapter because it encompasses the visual culture which

conditioned the main character’s development and not only hers.

In Western culture, children’s stories lay the foundation of a person’s identity as they

provide the early lessons one receives. Consequently, the novel places a high amount of

emphasis on them. The fact that the narrator designs the illustrations for fairy tale books is not

incidental, as it is a method to underline the ways in which cultural patterns are embedded in

one’s identity. It is suggested that for the sake of the profit which enabled her to continue with

her work she had to imitate, or, in other words, to conform to some social expectations that

provided the patterns which she had to follow in creating her work:” then I turn back to my

work, my deadline, the career I suddenly found myself having, I didn't intend to but I had to find

something I could sell”(Atwood 1979: 35).

In this novel, Atwood equates consumerism with Americanism where from the viewpoint

of the novel and its main character “ Americans are both perpetrators and products of a

‘laminated’ and debased culture” (Thomas 74). The novel gives another instance of commercial

mechanisms and the production of artistic works within commercial culture. As an artist who had

to produce works in this field, the narrator talks about the compromise she had to make in order

for her works to be marketable.

So I compromised; now I compromise before I take the work in, it saves time. I've

learned the sort of thing he wants: elegant and stylized, decoratively coloured, like

patisserie cakes. I can do that, I can imitate anything: fake Walt Disney, Victorian

etchings in sepia, Bavarian cookies, ersatz Eskimo for the home market. Though

what they like best is something they hope will interest the English and American

publishers too( 1979: 35-36).

By choosing a commercial artist as the main character and narrator of the novel, Atwood

shows, in a similar manner to Cat’s Eye, the mechanism behind the production of an artwork.

The work of Surfacing’s narrator involves more compromise from the part of the main character

seeing that it is related to commercialism to a higher degree than Elaine’s work. She paints

around what she reads. Her paintings are born out of her interpretation of the fairy tale but that

interpretation is socially mediated. The manner in which the narrator tells us how she carries on

55

with her work proves what Berger theorized in Ways of Seeing that the way we see things is

affected by what we know or what we believe which in turn is conditioned by society(2008: 8).

What the narrator has to reproduce is not taken from the world around her, it is taken from

another entity’s view on the world (“the fake Walt Disney, the Victorian etchings in sepia”).

According to Berger, “an image is a sight that has been recreated or reproduced” (2008: 9). With

this observation in mind, one of the aims of the novel is to identify the social influences in the

production of a visual piece. The narrator draws the female figure in one of her illustrations with

a body that fits within social patterns: “I outline a princess, an ordinary one, emaciated fashion-

model torso and infantile face, like those I did for ‘Favourite Fairy Tales’” (1979: 36).

Incongruously, the effects of fairy tales are articulated by Anna, the character who more

often than not internalizes the patriarchal values which are ascribed to women. The contrast

between Anna’ s contemplation of the status of a woman in her society and her actions is evident

in the lines where she tells the narrator that parents should not let their children read stories about

princesses that end up married and move into a castle: “‘Did you believe that stuff when you

were little?’ she says. ‘I did, I thought I was really a princess and I'd end up living in a castle.

They shouldn't let kids have stuff like that.’”(1979: 39). After her musings on this subject, she

falls into narcissistic act of looking in the mirror and arranging her face.

As Berger points out, there is a long tradition in visual arts that could be traced to the 15th

century where women are encouraged to be participants in their own objectification(2008: 1).

Vanity is presented as a feminine characteristic and narcissistic acts are associated with the

female gender. Two of the examples that he provides show the paintings’ female characters

gazing at the mirror. In relation to this, Berger argues that mirrors have been used as a symbol of

vanity in women and through the act of gazing at their own images they became “spectators of

[themselves]” (Berger 2008: 50) which meant that women “conniv[ed] in treating [themselves]

as, first and foremost, a sight” (Berger 2008: 51). Thus, in the case of Surfacing’s character

Anna, she stands before the reader as a product of these representations.

The problematic of the pose reveals that visual images of publicity are the product of

social knowledge and of a common understanding of how a person should act or appear, in

screen or in day-to-day life. Looking at her album, the nameless narrator feels revulsion towards

“imitation mother” and father. Later on in the novel, David initiates a cinematic project called

Random Samples and asks Anna to pose nude for it which she finally does despite her

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disagreement. In this case, the one which claims to produce an artwork, arranges a pose for the

model of the artwork from which it expected to gain an audience that is attuned to the

sexualization of the female body. Anna’s condition reveals that:

In the case of an artist’s model, she and her pose are directed towards someone-

intially toward a creator and ultimately, towards a larger audience. The audience,

in countless subtle ways, is attuned to the artist’ s treatment of the model,

wondering, for example about the “faithfulness” of a given rendering or the

artist’s emotional investment in the representation and its source. As a human

being in the studio or the presence in the painting, the model is connected to both

artist and audience (Steiner 2010: 12).

From this quote, one can establish that the efforts of those who create visual images

within mass media are put into satisfying an audience. The nude presence in a film will draw

attention especially to its sexualized form. The images which form gender identity belong to the

shared cultural and social understanding of femininity and masculinity concepts. In relation to

this, a feminist approach will pinpoint to the fact that:

the meaning of a written message, a visual image, or an auditory sound bite rests

not in the thing itself but instead in us—the reader, the viewer, the listener. We

are the ones who make meaning through a complex and mediated relationship

with things (real or imagined objects, people, events, ideas), the concepts we hold

of these things, and the language we use to communicate such concepts

(Alvermann 1999: 142).

Atwood shows the reader that fashion models act as role models for teenage girls. Those

images of culturally and socially accepted feminine beauty pervade the imaginary of the young

main character and it is evident that consumerism has taken control of her life beginning with her

teenage years. With reference to the adolescent stage of the narrators’ life, Sue Thomas explains

that the character’ s scrapbook from that period contained “no original drawings, merely

illustrations culled uncritically from magazines and pasted in”(80-81). I argue that, while the

illustrations she included in the scrapbook were not original, the whole arrangement was meant

to express and represent her personality. Thus, the question which is being raised is: Does any

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originality exist in an individual? When Berger describes the collages which can be found in

adults or children’s rooms he says that “all the images belong to the same language and all are

more or less equal within it because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match

and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant” (2008: 30). The same happens in the case of

Elaine’s collages on her mother. When she puts together the collage which represented the

mental image that she had with regard to her mother she uses the same material as the narrator

from Surfacing( cuttings from magazines) which proves that the individual is molded by the

images of a consumerist society. In Atwood’ s novels, characters are a mosaic of images drawn

from both high and popular culture and the visual representation of people through a collage or

“culling” of such images is in itself original because it is the product of one’s perspective of the

world which was made in a personal manner.

The question of identity and originality is further problematized. The first point that

Atwood puts forward by means of Surfacing is that the quest for originality is based on

renouncing embodied stereotypes. As Wendy Steiner points out, “focusing on the model as a

human being is a way to disentangle the notion of model from that of stereotype and commercial

product” (2010: 91). The narrator and main character succeeded in breaking free from

stereotypes by seeking refuge in nature. After she goes through all the images from her

childhood, adolescent years and even her adult years, the images which she embodied, the

patterns which she considered and the icons which she admired, she realizes that she is

overwhelmed by the artifice which began to represent her life and that she was giving up her

self-esteem for some absorbing representations which she disrelished. The symbolism of the

color red was analyzed by Sue Thomas in comparison with the pale faces of the women shown

on the pages of magazines. She argues that the princesses from the narrator’s artwork “look

bland and pretty; and anaemically lack the red associated with blood, anger and passion [which

are] held sacred in the Amerindian culture” (81). Based on chromatics, the main character and

narrator establishes a hierarchy of fruits: “There is one late strawberry, I find it among the matted

weeds and suckers. Red foods, heart colour, they are the best kind, they are sacred; then yellow,

then blue; green foods are mixed from blue and yellow” (131). Sue Thomas continues to

underline the contrast between devotion to nature and the blind dedication to consumerist

practices as she argues that “the fashion model poses constrain women’s natural bodies” (81).

During the moments when she has not yet learned about the advantages of connecting with

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nature, the narrator is shown in a state of moral decline, lacking energy or a positive view of the

world. Furthermore, the elements which existed before the artifice created by humans are

important for the purpose of solving such a crisis of identity. For the narrator, the colors red, blue

and yellow are sacred and the colors which result from their blending are on a lower level in her

hierarchy. The idea of going back to a state which existed before codes and rules is found in

Kristeva’ s theory as well. However, in this case, the theory is related mainly to language. She

argues that the forced separation between the semiotic and the symbolic brings about

melancholic feelings in a subject; the semiotic being the expressing of one’s feelings through

instinctual drives and the symbolic being the language which is based on codes and rules (Barrett

2011: 163-164).

The moment of awareness comes when she starts inquiring into the roles which she

followed so far. First of all, she analyzes them and after a process of self-examination, she

confronts them. At the end, she needs to retreat into nature, to a place which by definition is

untouched by human artifice. The climate in which her parents raised her was intended to be as

free from artifice as possible as her mother hated the glamour which the main character wanted

to achieve when she was young: "You don't need that here," I say, "there's no one to look at you"

My mother's phrase, used to me once when I was fourteen; she was watching, dismayed, as I

covered my mouth with Tango Tangerine. I told her I was just practicing” (1979: 29). The

narrator’s mother was the character who was closest to nature. She sought all her life to distance

herself and her daughter from unnaturalness. When the narrator told her that she was not coming

to her funeral she declared that she did not like them, hinting that their staginess represented, in

her view, an unpleasant aspect:” ‘I never enjoyed them,’ she said to me, one word at a time. ‘You

have to wear a hat. I don't like liquor’”(Atwood 1979: 13). In an earlier instance of the narrator’s

life, when she was putting together her collages, her mother expressed disapproval at the fact that

she is trying to embody the artifice of magazines and fashion models.

While the narrator is browsing through her childhood’s scrapbooks, the light is shed on

two main themes. Firstly, she presents the socially created male and female values whereby boys

are drawn to warfare and mechanical things and girls are more attracted to family life, marriage

and domestic activities. To exemplify, her brother’s scrapbook from when he was a boy

contained “explosions in red and orange, soldiers dismembering in the air, planes and tanks”

(1979: 65). While her scrapbook was packed with illustrations from magazines with “ladies of all

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kinds: holding up cans of cleanser, knitting, smiling, modelling toeless high heels and nylons

with dark seams and pillbox hats and veils” (1979: 65). Secondly, the effect of consumerism on

the female buyer of magazines is deeper as the Surfacing’ s main character and narrator reveals.

As a child she eagerly took in the icons which she saw in magazines, “ladies in exotic costumes,

sausage rolls of hair across their foreheads, with puffed red mouths and eyelashes like toothbrush

bristles: when I was ten I believed in glamour, it was a kind of religion and these were my icons”

(Atwood 1979: 28). As an adult, the narrator describes the pose of the fashion models which she

adored during her childhood: “one gloved hand over the hip, one foot stuck out in front”

(Atwood 1979: 28). It is important to note that these representations were passed forward

through the various visual media because, next to fairy tales, they were also a defining force in

the life of a teenage girl. In Surfacing, such followers of “glamour religion” (which are not only

the teenagers, as the character of Anna proves), take these images as their main source of life

lessons. The internalization of social norms regarding feminine beauty is proven by what Wendy

Steiner holds in The Real Real Thing when she says that:

A life model typically constructs herself as an image, however much the artist

may feel he is the one posing her and determining what aspects of her will be

represented. Many models invent their own poses, dress themselves for the studio

sessions, choose their makeup and hairdo-in short, fashion themselves as the

image to be rendered (2010: 22).

Although one can say that there is a trace of agency/self-determination in some female

models’ choice of pose, they contribute in the idealization of the female body and appearance.

The narrator distanced herself from the representations of the feminine ideal which were found in

magazines. In comparison, Anna displays the same conduct as the narrator had as a teenager. She

is described by her as: “a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an

imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere” (1979: 121). By

referencing this character earlier in the novel, the narrator states that she never saw her face

without make up: “shorn of the pink cheeks and heightened eyes her face is curiously battered, a

worn doll's, her artificial face is the natural one” (1979: 29). Thus, in the society whose rules and

inner workings exhaust the main character, artificiality is presented as a natural state. It is hard in

such conditions to distinguish what comes down naturally from what is socially conditioned.

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As the main character and narrator is in search of an original self, Anna moves further

away from it. The distinction between the narrator and Anna is that the latter continues to

heedlessly follow the patterns of a consumerist society while the narrator questions them. It is

not only the consumerist society which is put in limelight in these passages, it is also the

collective fantasy of the “captive princess.” Atwood uses a play of words whereby she describes

Anna as “a captive princess in someone’s head” (1979: 121). Apart from being a reference to the

Rapunzel or Snow White types of stories, it is also a manner of saying that she will always

embody and be viewed as the princess cliché, exemplifying the embodiment of mental images

regarding femininity.

The patterns of female images are drawn from what would be called the yesteryear of

visual art, only that in this case, the term is inapplicable because aspects of such visual

representations found their way into the present mass media. The comparison which Berger

makes in Ways of Seeing, between traditional paintings and contemporary visual images of

publicity is evident in Cat´s Eye as well: the Pre-Raphaelite features. He says that publicity is

“nostalgic” and that it propagates through images the consumer´s society beliefs and if they “are

used in a strictly contemporary language” they “would lack both confidence and credibility”

(2008: 139). Berger puts in the limelight the similarities between traditional paintings and the

images of advertising. He shows us that the stereotypes of women are being continued. To

exemplify, two of his pictures put forward the posture of women which has an iconic status in

fashion. In Surfacing, the narrator mentions the representations she could find during her teenage

years on the pages of magazines, pointing out to the typical “leg in front” posture. Berger traces

this tendency of representing femininity back to the tradition of paintings which focused on

mythology. Glamour, as we´ve seen in Cat´s Eye, needs to have connections to the past, to

traditional concepts of femininity where ideas for what it means to be a man or a woman are

generated through stereotypes.

As I have established above, in Surfacing, there is an intense analysis of Western

society’s involvement with reproduced images which are seen as devoid of emotion. Basing her

book on Kristeva’ s perspective on art and psychoanalysis, Estelle Barrett informs the reader that

in this society “ ‘new maladies of the soul’ have emerged in response to the “empty spectacle

and the bombardment of readymade images” (2011: 77). Throughout the first part of the novel,

the character struggles with a sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction which is not clearly

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stated for the reason that she cannot pinpoint the source and motives for this feeling. As she

begins to get further apart from the society which influenced the largest part of her life, she is

able to feel a sense of renewal. Kristeva holds that the artwork is a response to the human

condition in a contemporary Western society. Through her analysis of Kristeva’s book Black

Sun, Barrett argues that:

for the artist it is not a matter of illustrating grief, but of making an artwork out of

it, and in doing so restoring and renewing the subject and interpretations of

experience(2011: 77).

The novel works to large extent with the imagery of the woman brushing her hair while

being seated in front of a mirror. It describes the act of scrutinizing one’s physique. At the end of

the novel, the main character refuses to see her reflection and is full of despise towards the act of

arranging herself. This was part of the renewal process as it happened before she immersed

herself in water:

But when I pick up the brush there is a surge of fear in my hand, the power is

there again in a different form, it must have seeped up through the ground during

the lightning. I know that the brush is forbidden, I must stop being in the mirror. I

look for the last time at my distorted glass face: eyes lightblue in dark red skin,

hair standing tangled out from my head, reflection intruding between my eyes and

vision. Not to see myself but to see. I reverse the mirror so it's toward the wall, it

no longer traps me, Anna's soul closed in the gold compact, that and not the

camera is what I should have broken(1979: 129).

She stops focusing on her appearance and begins to concentrate on her relation with the

rest of the world (“Not to see myself but to see”), to realize what her role within society is. The

narrator is a commercial artist which, in light of the nameless character’ s description of her job’s

requirements, points to the fact that she is a pawn in the myth-making3 process of Western

tradition: “I'm what they call a commercial artist, or, when the job is more pretentious, an

illustrator. I do posters, covers, a little advertising and magazine work and the occasional

commissioned book like this one” (1979: 35). She provides the visual details which help 3 The term was used by Roland Barthes to explain the “production of social knowledge through the manipulation of the sign” (which in broad terms can be an image, or a word)(Barthes qtd. in White 2000: 29).

62

proliferate the cultural ideals of Western mass cultured society. For this reason, the novel has

been regarded by one critic as being a case in point for “the implications of the artist in the myth-

making process” (Brown qtd. in Gupta 2006: 31).Western myths are analyzed through the lens of

fairy-tale production because within it one can find some of the strategies of Western society’s

myth making process. It is important to note and to remind people about the elements which are

left out when myths are being created. The narrator makes us aware of the fact that in fairy-tales

some basic human functions are not represented, an illustration which further on reveals the

Western habit of polishing and hiding aspects of human lives that are considered displeasing:

Earlier they annoyed me, the stories never revealed the essential things about

them, such as what they ate or whether their towers and dungeons had bathrooms,

it was as though their bodies were pure air. It wasn't Peter Pan's ability to fly that

made him incredible for me, it was the lack of an outhouse near his underground

burrow(1979: 36).

In Surfacing, the reader sees that these feelings are set in motion by cultural factors. Such

factors halt the freedom of expression and artificially separate the pleasing from the displeasing,

sanity from madness, putting such concepts within clearly defined boundaries which more often

than not are of visual nature: the mental image of a mad person includes a certain features such

as a messy hair, or the mental image of a beautiful woman includes make-up, slim figure and so

on. Such contentions reveal that the mind can be trained to see and then perceive the world in a

culturalized manner. In the passages below, the narrator foresees that the state in which she was

when she came back from the woods would be subject to criticism:

They would never believe it’s only a natural woman, state of nature, they think of

that as a tanned body on a beach with washed hair waving like scarves; not this,

face dirt-caked and streaked, skin grimed and scabby, hair like a frayed bath-mat

stuck with leaves and twigs. Anew kind of centerfold(Atwood 1979: 140).

In this light, the narrator’ s difficulty in figuring out the sketches based on Indian rock

paintings is explainable: Western systems of representation have a different form than the Indian

ones and the cultural codes that influence our knowledge of the world vary and as this varies the

way we see a picture is diversified. Hence, the narrator inclined to move further away from one

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system of knowledge into another that was unfamiliar to the one she was used to. The paintings

which she wanted to understand were the product of a social and cultural knowledge which was

not hers. To interpret the pictures, the main character needed a historical account. For her it was

a non-Western art which needed to be put in Western terms. In this case, it was her father who

imposed explanations on pictures. Very influential in his thought pattern were his main subjects

of interest, geometry and arithmetic:

he taught us arithmetic, our mother taught us to read and write. Geometry, the

first thing I learned was how to draw flowers with compasses, they were like acid

patterns. Once they thought you could see God that way but all I saw was

landscapes and geometrical shapes(1979: 75).

Her father was in the habit of measuring and making calculations and represented the

world from a purely mathematical and strict perspective. Reality was measured in the images and

pictures which could be explained in clear-cut terms. What did not have boundaries,

measurements and what could not be explained in the light of conventions did not exist. Thus, in

Western imaginary, an image must be describable through a known linguistic system in order to

obtain validity. In relation to this, Mitchell notes that:

Images which are regulated by the ideal purposes of language, by the rule of

judgment and prosaic difference, will be “clear and distinct” (Mitchell 1986: 122).

Through his treatment of Indian rock paintings, the narrator’s father displays a tendency

of putting prevalent cultural forms/products of Native Americans and European into distinct

categories, as he notes that: “The static rigidity is in marked contrast to the rock paintings of

other cultures, most notably the European cave paintings” (1979: 74). In connection to this, it is

necessary to mention Mitchell’s table which charts Locke’s theory of imagery where

resemblance and difference, images and words, obscure images and clear images (122).

The realm of prose and discursive values turns out to be aligned with clear,

distinct ideas or mental pictures, and the realm of poetry and fancy that

proliferates these images seems to cancel itself out by producing images that

cannot be seen (Mitchell 1986: 123).

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In the same chapter the author includes Edmund Burke’s counter arguments to Locke’s

theory, whereby, through the act of “making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we

create,[…]but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination” (Burke qtd. in

Mitchell 1986: 123). The obscurity which the narrator’s father perceived in images comes from

the absence of a system of knowledge through which one could relate to such images. The

ethnocentrism and the preoccupation with sticking to conventions make the understanding of

these images harder. Mitchell uses the term “ethnocentric projection”, “ a fantasy devised to

secure a conviction that our [i.e. the images of the Western tradition] images are free from any

taint of superstition, fantasy or compulsive behavior” (1986: 91). Thus, on the basis of this quote,

he proposes to look closely at cultural values and to keep an open mind to the idea that a Western

evaluation of various cultures is the product of a through and through ethnocentric perspective.

In addition to an ethnocentric perspective, there is a tendency in Western culture to

suppress natural inclinations with the “symbolic order”. Following the psychoanalythical

theories of Lacan, French psychoanalysts like Kristeva and Irigaray aim to reveal the importance

of a “ language that simulates a return to the Imaginary in its subversion of the intervening

Symbolic order” (Hengen 1993: 30). As Kristeva noted: “Language as a symbolic function

constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drives and continuous relation to the

mother” (Kristeva qtd. in Hengen 1993: 32). The narrator and main character went through such

a process of repression, seeing that as growing up she dismissed her mother’s interventions. Her

mother was a character that criticized the artifices of the surrounding social rituals and mass

cultural factors. The description of hunted and murdered animals and the exploitation of land, as

it is seen in the passages where the narrator realizes she cannot find one of the drawings marked

on the map because the water level was artificially raised through the construction of dams, is

representative of the Western drive to impose the symbolic over the semiotic, or in other words,

to impose its rules over a more natural development. In Carol Ann Howells’ words,” Surfacing

might be read not only as a psychological and spiritual quest but also as the record of a gendered

quest for a new language which is more responsive to an organic conceptualization of reality”

( Howells qtd. in Bruckner 2006: 77). In Surfacing, all things related to nature are separate from

the symbolic order and from the system of knowledge which holds center stage in the Western

society. As the narrative evolves and as the narrator gradually feels her complicity in the

exploitation of all things speechless, she begins to resemble the type of artist Kristeva lauds; the

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one “who consciously seeks the verbal and visual means to reveal what is not contained in the

established discourses” (Barrett 2011: 32). The words unspoken or the images which cannot be

seen represent the focus of the narrator’s story. As she concentrates on the things she finds hard

to interpret or the memories which discarded before the trip, she begins to have a different

understanding of the difference between illusion and reality. Only at the end of the novel, the

memory of the narrator’s abortion surfaces as she trains herself to separate fake memories from

actual occurrences and their effects on her psyche:

It was all real enough, it was enough reality for ever, I couldn't accept it, that

mutilation, ruin I'd made, I needed a different version. I pieced it together the best

way I could, flattening it, scrapbook, collage, pasting over the wrong parts. A

faked album, the memories fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better

than none and I could almost live in it, I'd lived in it until now (1979: 105).

She doesn’t know which thoughts belong to herself, a condition which raises in her the

feeling of powerlessness. During the trip back to her hometown, she realizes that there has come

a time when she has to separate what others’ think and what she thinks. The feeling of power is

unknown to her and she cannot fully grasp it. Power in this case is exercised when it can be

applied to one’s own life. In relation to this, the narrator in the story, at every glance into the

moment when she did the abortion, she is divided between feelings of guilt at her own decision

of doing it and powerlessness in the face of her lover’s coercion. Only at the end, is she

determined to shed off the victim behavior and old patterns of belief to realize that she was an

active participant in the development of her life.

Atwood describes the effect of cultural codes on the process of understanding and

interpreting an image ( a painting of any sort). As I mentioned earlier, the narrator’s producer

insisted for her to copy the style and form of previous commercial works which were done in

relation to fairy-tales for them to be more admissible by the public. At the end of the novel, the

narrator provides another depiction of this effect, when she grapples with the interpretation of the

Indian rock paintings which were copied on paper by her father. The symbolical references were

distant from her understanding as they broke a certain pattern which she followed when she was

seeing and understanding a certain artwork. The paintings were Indian and as such they

contained symbols which related to a culture which was foreign to Western viewer. While

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retreating into the forest, the narrator goes further away from her culture and immerses into

another environment which she knows little about. In other words, she leaves behind something

she knows and something which so far defined her identity in order to go through a different

formative experience. In conventional terms, the final acts of the narrator can be interpreted as a

switch to mad state but there are consistent explanations which serve to show the revelatory

nature of her actions. In the novel “the only cure […]is the journey of self-discovery: down and

through the darkness of the divided self to the undifferentiated wholeness of archaic

consciousness-and back” (Rubenstein qtd. in Bouson 1993: 55). These passages put across the

idea that the self is divided into the necessity of abiding by the status quo and the inclination to

find new perspectives and world views.

In conclusion, Surfacing presents a crisis of identity where the subject lacks control over

her life. I argue that the main character needed to distance herself from the consumerist society

in order for her to go through the renewing process at the end of the novel. She could not achieve

this soul purging through her visual work because it had been influenced since the beginning of

her career by consumerism and by the custom built images which, in turn, she had to reproduce.

5. Conclusion

Visual culture is seen in the three novels as a key player in the formation of gender

identity and selfhood. The characters are exposed to a world of images through which ideas on

how to behave, look and feel circulate at a fast pace. In those images the visible elements which

appear on the plain surface are not as important as what can be found outside the frames.

Individuals hold in high esteem the presence of images as theories of ocularcentrism have

showed so far. Atwood’ s fiction displays her awareness of this condition which is typical of

contemporary culture. As a result, her novels and short fiction show the readers that social

organization and practices are expressed through images and by looking at them closely one will

find explanations and answers about one’s individuality.

Intermediality and the interrelationship between words and images appear in Atwood’s

novels as a significant strategy for getting a clearer view on what forms selfhood in present-day

societies. As we have seen, especially in Lady Oracle, the way images are constructed make the

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individual feel insignificant. Most importantly, they pass along concepts which bridle the

freedom of expression of the female character. They surround her as they play with and are

based on cultural codes which give them authority. As suggested by the readings above, the most

important thing to note in relation to our readiness to embody the images that we see in the world

around us is that we think of ourselves in images.

The three novels are literary renderings of the significant effects which the act of

unleashing memory has. It helps the character to let go of negative feelings and it brings self-

awareness as well as spiritual relief. In Lady Oracle the events from Joan’s past are full of visual

material which she took in because feelings of inappropriateness arose as she placed herself in

comparison to the surrounding (visual) representations. In the case of Cat’s Eye, where the

narrator is a visual artist, the recollection of events appears on canvas. On the other hand,

Surfacing deals more with cultural patterns which influenced her childhood and adult life while

providing examples of the visual culture which includes and makes them proliferate.

In order to reveal the role of visual culture in the process of remembering past events and

figures, I have argued that memory serves to re-assess the influence of the visual media in the

main characters and narrators’ lives. Retrospection and introspection are two psychological

processes which bring into existence the narrators and main characters’ self-awareness.

Another significant theme that arises from the chapters above is the common shared

knowledge in Western society that what is recognizable as reality is in fact, reality. Photography,

as we have seen, is the exemplifying mechanism that represents and at the same time, hides the

truth. It is not reality as a whole, it is a person’s interpretation of reality. Cat’s Eye shows the

reader that the photographer chooses the aspect from the outside world which she wants to

appear in her photographs. As it has been established in the first chapter of the dissertation, the

techniques of photographing show that the photographer stages the picture that he/she wants to

be seen by the public. When it comes to representing female identity, Lady Oracle shows the

reader that features of femininity which appear in publicity images are limiting and do not offer

many opportunities for the female subject to construct a more complex identity: she is taught by

her mother that nobody cares about the people who do not fit into established patterns of

personal appearance.

Mirror gazing is represented as an act of vanity which is conditioned by society. Joan’s

mother focuses at every step on her and her daughter’ s outward aspects and wants to alter them

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in order to make them fit mainstream expectations, as defined and promoted in visual culture. In

Surfacing, Anna is consumed with her own image-reflection and with the mental image that she

has of femininity and what she is supposed to embody. Based on these considerations, she

composes her look. However, in Cat’s Eye, mirror gazing triggers self-awareness when Elaine

looks at her reflection and realizes that she has been modeled by the mental image which her

boyfriend had of desirable features of femininity. Regardless of the different perspectives on

mirror gazing, the idea which comes across is that the characters have to look critically at the

world in order to recognize the patterns which are imposed on them.

As such, we are presented with a public which accepts the codes and conventions of

Western visual culture and the viewing subject must be taken into consideration when we speak

about the alienation of an individual in this society. Audience response is what the ones that

produce commercial art bear in mind. Through the characters’ consideration of their audience’s

response, Atwood renders the social influence on her main characters’ behavior and appearance.

Readers learn that her characters’ freedom to express themselves is counteracted with the

weapons of social norms. As such, Joan’ s body was subject to scrutinity and regulation by her

mother who was a consumer of publicity images, Elaine’ s behavior was controlled by her

childhood tormentors and the nameless character from Surfacing is required by her job to

reproduce readymade images.

Seeing that, in the makings of visual culture, some aspects are presented and some aspects

are left out, memory also serves to take a look at the things which the characters did not take into

consideration until the moment of remembering. Thus, the novels also contemplate the things

that are unseen, or the words that are not yet spoken. All three characters take a critical stance

toward the mass-produced representations within their culture. Joan looks at visual features of

mass culture and ponders on their effect; Elaine looks at them, considers their effects and re-uses

them in an original manner to create artwork.

I have argued that in the three novels the necessity for a different system of knowledge

and a different process of myth-making is being expressed. In the case of the three female

characters, the visual images which are created along patriarchal lines need to include different

discourses and representations. In Lady Oracle and Cat’ s Eye, the images which are considered

by a majority to be visual guidelines for behavior and appearance are re-considered by the main

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characters who search beyond the pictures that come directly into sight and beyond pre-

established manners of interpreting those pictures. In Surfacing this idea is most noticeable

because of the extensive change of perspective which the narrator undergoes. While at the

beginning she finds herself is a state of mental disarray, the experience in a convention-free

space brings about her awakening. At the end of Surfacing, the nature which has been overruled

by the artifice of humans stands as a source of inspiration.

All three characters enter unchartered territories and through their experiences Atwood

conveys the increasing need for change in visual conventions so as to suit more individuals.

Through my observations, arguments and analysis of Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye and Surfacing, I

conclude that instead of helping to create new systems of knowledge and/or worldviews, the

present images of mass culture consolidate the traditional ones. From the perspective of gender

identity, new ways of producing visual representations will include more possibilities for the

female subject to express herself freely.

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6. Works Cited

Primary Sources

Atwood, Margaret. Bluebeard's Egg: Stories. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. London: Virago Press, 2009.

Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. New York: Anchor, 1998.

Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. London: Virago Press, 2009.

Atwood, Margaret. Morning in the Burnt House. Canada: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1995.

Atwood, Margaret. Selected Poems 1965-1975. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.

Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. London: Virago Press, 1979.

Atwood, Margaret. Wilderness Tips. New York: Anchor Books, 1998.

Secondary Sources

Alphen, Eric van. Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Alvermann, Donna. “A Feminist Critique of Media Representation.” Semali, Ladislaus and Ann

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Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999. 141-155.

Atwood, Margaret. "Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For." Talkingpeople.net. N.p., n.d. Web. 20

Jan. 2012. <http://www.talkingpeople.net/tp/literature/atwood/ophelia.pdf>.

Barrett, Estelle. Kristeva Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts. London: I. B. Tauris,

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Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 2008.

Bouson, J. Brooks. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the

Novels of Margaret Atwood. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1993.

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Bruckner, Lynne Dickson. “Surfacing in the Ecofeminist Classroom.” Atlantis: Critical Studies

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Doy, Gen. Picturing the Self: Changing Views of the Subject in Visual Culture. London:

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Gerhard, Jane F. Desiring Revolution: Second-wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American

Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.

Gupta, Rama. Margaret Atwood: A Psychoanalytical Study. Elgin, IL: New Dawn, 2006.

Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery.

Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Reinventing Womanhood. New York: Norton, 1979.

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